{"title":"Salami \u0026 Sausage","description":"\u003ch2 style=\"text-align: center;\"\u003eSalami \u0026amp; Sausage Top Sellers\u003c\/h2\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"fennel-pork-sausage-links","title":"FENNEL SAUSAGE","description":"[TABS]\n\u003ch5\u003eProduct\u003cbr\u003e\n\u003c\/h5\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eFennel Sausage\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003eThree 1lb packs, 4 links per package\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eFennel is one of the most popular seasonings in Italian cooking and the key to these incredibly toothsome sausages. They boast a light but complex taste and are easy for everyone to fall in love with. Whether cooked on the grill or in a skillet, eaten with peppers and onions, with mustard on a bun or in pasta, this is a wonderful take on the classic Sweet Italian Sausage and perfect with any recipe. \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eOur fennel sausage is produced by the talented hands of Paradise Locker Meats outside Kansas City, butchers who operate a Certified Humane facility.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe secret to great pork is to start off with great ingredients, and nothing beats our storied heritage breeds — Berkshire, Red Wattle, Duroc, Gloucestershire Old Spot, and Tamworth. Each breed comes from a different culinary tradition, and boasts a distinctive, nuanced flavor.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eIngredients: \u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003epork, water, spices, salt.\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eHumanely raised on pasture \u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e100% antibiotic-free\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eRaised by independent family farmers\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eHeritage breeds have more marbling resulting in more tender and juicy meat\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003c\/ul\u003e\n\u003ch5\u003eFarms\u003c\/h5\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eWhen Heritage Foods started in 2001 we set out to sell heritage Thanksgiving turkeys. For three years our turkey project grew, but naturally mating turkey is a seasonal food and two of the three farmers we worked with to raise birds were looking for a more regular source of income if they were to continue working with us. So we committed to selling pork, which can be produced year round, as long as the breeds came from historic genetic lines, just like the turkeys. Now, 24 years later, Heritage Foods still works with those two original farms who together introduced the word “heritage pork” to hundreds of America’s best restaurants from coast-to-coast as well as thousands of homes through the Heritage Foods retail website.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'San Francisco', 'Segoe UI', Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 0.875rem;\"\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eNewman Farm Berkshire Pork\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eMyrtle, Missouri\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'San Francisco', 'Segoe UI', Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 0.875rem;\"\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eIn 2006 we got a handwritten letter from farmer Mark Newman asking us if Heritage Foods would ever consider selling his pasture raised old school Berkshire pigs. We said yes and a relationship grew that still continues today, now through his son David who has maintained the genetic line of Berkshires which can be traced back to the 17th and 18th century lines that came to these shores by way of the Berkshire region of England.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'San Francisco', 'Segoe UI', Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 0.875rem;\"\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eFrom the air, Newman Farm Berkshire Pork, in south central Missouri, in the heart of the Ozarks, looks more like a pioneer settlement or a holiday camp than any sort of pig farm. Wooden huts are scattered across green fields like bungalows, where contented Berkshire pigs live their lives, happily on-pasture.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'San Francisco', 'Segoe UI', Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 0.875rem;\"\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003ePigs on Newman Farm are raised 100% on-pasture. The sows raise their piglets in huts that dot the fields of the farm. The babies live inside the huts until they are old enough to jump over the 6-inch wooden board that blocks the entrance. Once they make the great leap, they have an entire field to run on and they can mingle with the other piglets from the other huts.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'San Francisco', 'Segoe UI', Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 0.875rem;\"\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eDavid Newman is both a farmer and scientist. “The farmer came first,” he laughs. His degrees are in animal science, and he holds a Ph.D in meat science and muscle biology, focused on meat quality. “As I became a scientist and got involved in education, I applied what I was learning to understand what we could do better.”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'San Francisco', 'Segoe UI', Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 0.875rem;\"\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eBerkshires were the favorite breed of British royalty and were first introduced to the New World in 1823. Since then, Berkshire bloodlines have remained exceptionally pure and have become a mainstay favorite of chefs and diners, legendary for their exceptionally bright pork flavor and thick, delicious fat cap. And if anyone were to question their excellence, just ask David. “It’s not a matter of opinion!” he insists, passionately. “It’s a scientific fact, Berkshires are the most marbled hog on the market today.” David is a master breeder and works hard to keep the lines on his farm separate and he is always working to improve the Berkshire breed on his farm.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'San Francisco', 'Segoe UI', Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 0.875rem;\"\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eDavid lives on the farm with his wife, Kristin, his mom Rita, and his two kids. “I got my start through my family. My parents were hog farmers, but primarily in the commercial pig business. In the 1980s my parents raised pigs in confinement. There were some very challenging economic times for everyone in production, and we realized we were going to have to do something differently. Kristin came from a family farming background also and is a major part of the operations success today, working for the farm along with their team of employees.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'San Francisco', 'Segoe UI', Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 0.875rem;\"\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e“In the 1990s my parents decided they wanted to go back to their roots. We were going to have to be very large to be successful in the commercial sector, and my father decided we should focus on quality. We changed our genetic program and our nutrition program. We became Certified Humane®, and we chose to focus on Berkshire pigs for their quality.”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'San Francisco', 'Segoe UI', Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 0.875rem;\"\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eDavid and his family are the future of American farming! They are young, energetic and very passionate about the future of agriculture. David and Kristin work with a team of farmers who raise their Berkshires to supply Heritage Foods and the national network of chefs who rely on his product for their menus.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'San Francisco', 'Segoe UI', Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 0.875rem;\"\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eLazy Red Wattle Ranch\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eLa Plata, Missouri\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eWe met Larry and Madonna Sorell in 2002, as growers for Frank Reese and the Heritage Turkey Project. As their turkey flock grew in size, so did the Sorell’s importance to Heritage Foods.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eWhen you see Red Wattle pork on a menu, what you are seeing is a five-state, twelve farm network founded by Larry and Madonna, dedicated to raising a storied breed that was once upon a time nearly extinct. Larry and Madonna are the heroes of this story, avatars of the heritage food movement, true believers who were destined to become the Guardians of the Red Wattle. They are proof positive of the ethos that when it comes to endangered livestock, “you have to eat them to save them.”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eIn the beginning, back in 2004 when the Heritage Foods wholesale business began selling pigs, a market for the Red Wattle pig was built on a handshake agreement with chefs Zach Allen and Mark Ladner, then at Lupa Restaurant in NYC. They recognized the high-quality and undiminished taste that came from a Red Wattle pig humanely raised on-pasture and antibiotic free, using traditional farming methods. The deal with Ladner, and the partnership with Larry and his Lazy Red Wattle Ranch, were part of the origins of Heritage Foods.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e“We traveled 18,000 miles to get started,” Larry says matter-of-factly about a Heritage Foods Odyssey whose mission was to search out rare Red Wattle sows and collect a viable genetic lineage of this incredible pig whose American legacy goes back to 18th century New Orleans. \"When we began, we had two Red Wattle gilts and a boar, and we had to travel all over the United States to start a herd.\"\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e“Now I’ve kinda retired from raising animals, but we have a dozen Amish growers working with us, and I pick up the hogs and pay for them, and then bring them to the processor, Paradise Locker. I drive a tractor trailer and go around picking up three hundred pounders, fifty to eighty head a week. We have farms in Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, Iowa... that’s a lot of traveling. We may have four or five pick-ups every week. You wear out a truck pretty fast.”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eLarry, now over eighty, does less of the driving, but he still keeps all the relationships going, which isn’t easy considering the Amish don’t have phones inside their homes! “I’ll have to quit sometime but right now it’s going pretty good. The driving is easy. The hard job is you gotta keep Amish families happy, picking up their hogs, coordinating, monitoring the size of the animals, and making sure we have the right amount — each week we round up 50 to 100 pigs. And we’ve been doing it for almost 20 years now.”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eThanks to Larry and Madonna’s work, the Red Wattle was upgraded to Threatened status from Critical on The Livestock Conservancy’s watch list, a great achievement for the cause of biodiversity, one of the most important issues of our time.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'San Francisco', 'Segoe UI', Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 0.875rem;\"\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eMetzger Farm\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eSeneca, Kansas\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eDoug Metzger's Tamworth and Berkshire genetics are now being shepherded by Robert Funk. Doug sadly passed away in 2023. \u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eDoug Metzger was truly at the ground zero of our business and the heritage food movement. He was the magic man that first introduced us to our processor Paradise Locker Meats, with whom we have worked and grown ever since and he worked together with Frank Reese raising heritage turkeys from about 2002 to 2013.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eAt 83-years-old, Doug raises purebred, certified Berkshire and Tamworth pigs on his 1,500 acre farm in Seneca, Kansas, with his wife Betty.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eIn an era of specialization Doug is an anomaly. Doug is famous for adapting to any moment. In 2001 he took our call and agreed to raise heritage turkeys for us with Frank because he believed that the growing food movement would appreciate the flavor of the birds his grandfather raised. As demand grew for quality meat, Doug got into heritage pigs and transitioned his commodity farm to a pastured farm and haven for the rare Tamworth breed.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eDoug has been farming since 1951. As a kid he raised chickens but gave them up when he got into turkeys. As he got older, he broke into the milk cattle game. Then he tried sheep, but he says he couldn’t get them to breed right. He also raised Aylesbury ducks — a rare heritage breed. Over the years the acres on his sprawling farm have been used to grow wheat, corn, oats, barley, sorghum, alfalfa, and rye. He even grew flax one year because he heard it was supposed to help the immune system of the cattle, which he thought it did. “It certainly made their coats look wonderful,” Doug says.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eToday farmers are incentivized to grow monocrops of corn and soybean — “that’s all they want us to grow,” Doug explains, “and farmers haul their crops to town instead of using it for something on their own farm.” Doug remembers fondly the days when a diversified farm would grow corn and turn it into whiskey, or when soybeans were grown for the purpose of feeding milk cattle — as Doug did on his farm. “Keep your grain,” Doug insists, “and use it to grow a truly sustainable farm.”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eDoug was never one to use chemicals to grow food. He believes any talk of sustainability is not real when you raise only one crop or when you use chemicals to do it. “My buddy and I could clear 100 acres of weeds in a day if we worked through the night, and we did not need any additives to do it. All those chemicals are part of the reason there are so many cancers around, if you ask me.” Doug has amassed generations of farming secrets having grown so many foods naturally, often calling upon experiences from decades ago to solve a problem that presents itself today.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eDoug comes from a truly great American farming family — Life Magazine once wrote that Doug’s father, who lived to be 104, had more living descendants than any American – many of them farmers. His is part of the story of immigrants who came to the New World and made good through old-fashioned values, tradition, and hard work.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e“We’re here today to save these breeds,” says Doug, who is as down-home as the farm he still works on as he approaches his 84th birthday. “Save the breeds and make a little money. We got a lot of things going on, we have a lot of land. But it’s getting hard to keep up with it all… I need more young people! When I was young, we raised turkeys in spring and sold ‘em all by Christmas. We milked cattle all year round. I want to keep working — my dad was helping me when he was 84!”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eHis conversational style always brings insight and interesting thoughts to bear. We hope Doug and Betty work with us for many years to come and that their beliefs of diversified farming continue. Today, his farm is supported through the work of his daughter Marilyn and her husband Stan, and their children Simon and Joel.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'San Francisco', 'Segoe UI', Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 0.875rem;\"\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eGood Farm\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eOlsburg, Kansas\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003eGood Farms' Old Spot, Duroc, and Tamworth genetics are now being shepherded by Dustin and Maria Torneden since Craig and his wife Amy retired in 2024. \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eWe met the Goods through a connection at Kansas State University where Craig’s father was a distinguished professor. Craig spent his life in agriculture growing up in the Flint Hills of Kansas, some of the best agricultural land in the world, perfectly adapted to free ranging livestock, which feed on the perennial grasses that grow there naturally.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eThe Good’s hog operation began in earnest in 1981, and they have continuously raised hogs there for the past 37 years. Their Duroc herd started with a few sows from Craig’s former employer who started raising Duroc pigs in the 1940s — with females obtained through Sears and Roebucks! As Craig explains, “I took a job in 1975 working with an outstanding stockman who raised purebred Duroc pigs here in Kansas. His name was Fred Germann, and he was one of the oldest and best Duroc breeders in the U.S. Things sure have changed since then, but the Durocs that we now raise have ancestry that goes back to those Sears females, approximately 85 years ago.”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eDuroc is an American breed that was used as the foundational genetics for the entire pig industry in the United States because of their good growth rate, body type, and mothering instincts. But big agriculture continued to overbreed the Duroc for certain traits related to higher profits and they crossed it with other pig breeds. Soon the industrial pig became utterly unrecognizable, and it became almost impossible to tell that it had originally derived from Duroc genetics.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eCraig, on the other hand, continued to breed his Durocs to improve their genetics with traits particular to Craig’s preferences, while staying true to the original healthy and hearty breed. Craig always put a lot of thought into which sows he would breed with which boars as he worked to improve meat quality and edibility, as opposed to faster growth. He also selected pigs for the demeanor of the animals, who he treats like members of his own family. Craig bred for strong animals and sought out leaner carcasses (although the Duroc is supremely marbled). He also bred for skeletal size – Craig likes good length of body, for better loin eye size and fat distribution.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eOver the years, the Durocs on Good Farm became his own breed, even though they looked like and acted like true old school Durocs. The Goods continue to bring in new lines to avoid inbreeding, but they work with the lines to continue improving their particular version of the Duroc.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eCraig and Amy also raise Gloucestershire Old Spots and Tamworths, both considered rare breeds.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eCraig's father, Don, was a meat scientist and would eventually have a division of Kansas State University named after him. Together they raised purebred Angus cattle and crops on the farm. “I have had a passion for raising pigs,” says Craig, since taking pigs on as a 4-H project in 1965. Craig studied Animal Science at Kansas State University. “Amy and I were married in 1976 and 5 years later we made the decision to move to the farm that my father and mother had owned since 1961, near Olsburg, Kansas, on 1000 acres of Flint Hills pasture.”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch5\u003eBreed\u003c\/h5\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eRed Wattle\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThreatened: Fewer than 1,000 annual registrations in the United States.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOrigin: 18th Century Louisiana by way of New Caledonia.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFlavor Profile: Described as a cross between pork and beef, Red Wattle is floral and robust, concentrated and bold.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eProducers: A consortium of 18 Amish families in Iowa, Nebraska, Missouri, and Kansas.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHistory: French colonists brought these hogs to New Orleans as a favored meat breed. The Red Wattle eventually would populate the forests of Texas where they were rounded up and brought to the great slaughterhouses of Chicago. Recognized by their signature wattles that hang from the jowl, the Red Wattle resembles Kunekune pigs of New Zealand.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eGloucestershire Old Spot\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThreatened: Fewer than 1,000 annual registrations in the United States.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOrigin: 19th Century Indiana by way of Berkeley Valley of Gloucestershire, England.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFlavor Profile: Described as a charcuterie pig with a delicious milky fat.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eProducers: Craig and Amy Good outside of Manhattan, Kansas.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHistory: Descended from the native old English pigs of western England, this pig was mentioned as early as the 1780's. The spotted pig forages on fallen orchard fruits and other farm by products. Despite their signature oversized floppy ears which hang over their eyes, this gentle pig is hearty and self-reliant.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eTamworth\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThreatened: Fewer than 2,500 annual registrations in the United States.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOrigin: Rossville, Illinois by way of Staffordshire, England by way of Ireland.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFlavor Profile: A premiere bacon producer, Tamworth meat is fruity, earthy, clean, mineral, root, sweet and tender.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eProducers: Doug Metzger and Craig and Amy Good in Kansas.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHistory: The only native red breed to England, its heritage traces back to the wild pigs of Middle Age Europe. A slow growing breed, the Tamworth is active and hearty. Traditionally raised in the woods, the pig's long angular snout makes it an excellent forager — Tamworth pigs do not conform to industrial agriculture needs.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eBerkshire\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOrigin: 1823 Kentucky\/ Illinois by way of Western England and outside London.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFlavor Profile: Sweet with depth of flavor, Berkshire pork is balanced and the most universally loved of all the Heritage breeds.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eProducers: David Newman and a consortium of 12 family farms in Kansas, Missouri and Iowa.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHistory: For years the Royal Family kept a large Berkshire herd at Windsor Castle — our Berkshire pigs are traceable back to these old English genetics. This would eventually become the most popular Heritage breed of pig in the United States because of its supreme marbling. Prized by the Japanese who imported it as \"Kurobuta\" pork, the Berkshire is recognized by 6 white spots at the tip of its feet, nose and tail.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eDuroc\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOrigin: Eastern United States and corn belt by way of the Guinea coast of Africa.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFlavor Profile: Duroc meat is crisp and clean — known for great marbling and polished texture its taste is approachable on the palate.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eProducers: Craig and Amy Good outside Manhattan, Kansas.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHistory: The Duroc is an older breed of American domestic pig that has become one of the most popular breeds because of its great taste and strong genetics, but pure Duroc is very hard to find. Durocs are a red pig strain developed around 1800 in New England and reputed to trace their ancestry back to the early red pigs of Africa. Durocs are especially valued by farmers for their hardiness and quick but thorough muscle growth.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch5\u003eCooking\u003c\/h5\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eGrilling: Remove sausage from its packaging and pat it dry. Fire up your grill and lower to medium heat. Use a knife to score the sausages so they do not burst on the grill. Place the sausages on the grill and cook for 8-10 minutes, turning occasionally to ensure even cooking.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOven Roasting: Preheat the oven to 375ºF. Remove sausage from its packaging and pat it dry. Place it on a rack in a roasting pan and place the pan in the oven.Roast for 15-20 minutes and flip sausages halfway through cooking to ensure even browning on both sides.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e[\/TABS]\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Heritage Foods USA","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":12490835886122,"sku":"431 (3pks)","price":69.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/2602\/4380\/products\/Fennel2_1.jpg?v=1558113052"},{"product_id":"hot-italian-sausage","title":"HOT ITALIAN SAUSAGE","description":"[TABS]\n\u003ch5\u003eProduct\u003cbr\u003e\n\u003c\/h5\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eHot Italian Sausage \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cspan\u003eThree 1lb wheels\u003cbr\u003eCrafted by New York City's own Pepe Giocoli\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis flavor is Pepe’s perfect creation for those who love a spicy sausage featuring red pepper and paprika.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eYou can also try this \u003cspan\u003esausage\u003c\/span\u003e in our \u003ca rel=\"noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/heritagefoods.com\/products\/sausage-sampler-now-50-off\" target=\"_blank\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eSausage\u003c\/span\u003e Sampler\u003c\/a\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/heritage-foods-usa.myshopify.com\/admin\/products\/4645425578042\" target=\"_blank\"\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e which also includes: Pepe’s Pepper \u0026amp; Onion and Garlic \u0026amp; Broccoli Rabe wheels! \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePepe Giocoli produces New York\/Italian classic sausages using 100% heritage breed pasture raised pork. This is the sausage that can be found throughout Little Italy, at the San Gennaro fair, in Queens, and in Brooklyn — the thin wheel gives each sausage a perfect snap. Pasture raised heritage breeds produce marbled delicious meat, so every bite is sure to be sweet and juicy.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eParma Sausage Co. has been producing the very best New York style sausages from an original family recipe since the 1950's. This is truly the apex of the Italian-American art of sausage making. This is third generation greatness from a no-nonsense artisan who wears his white butcher’s smock like a coat of armor. New York has its own regional cuisine, and these Italian sausages are true classics.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eIngredients: \u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003epork, water, salt, dextrose, fennel, paprika, crushed red pepper, flavorings, in sheep casing.\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eHumanely raised on pasture \u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e100% antibiotic-free\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eRaised by independent family farmers\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eHeritage breeds have more marbling resulting in more tender and juicy meat\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003c\/ul\u003e\n\u003ch5\u003eFarms\u003c\/h5\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eWhen Heritage Foods started in 2001 we set out to sell heritage Thanksgiving turkeys. For three years our turkey project grew, but naturally mating turkey is a seasonal food and two of the three farmers we worked with to raise birds were looking for a more regular source of income if they were to continue working with us. So we committed to selling pork, which can be produced year round, as long as the breeds came from historic genetic lines, just like the turkeys. Now, 24 years later, Heritage Foods still works with those two original farms who together introduced the word “heritage pork” to hundreds of America’s best restaurants from coast-to-coast as well as thousands of homes through the Heritage Foods retail website.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'San Francisco', 'Segoe UI', Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 0.875rem;\"\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eNewman Farm Berkshire Pork\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eMyrtle, Missouri\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'San Francisco', 'Segoe UI', Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 0.875rem;\"\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eIn 2006 we got a handwritten letter from farmer Mark Newman asking us if Heritage Foods would ever consider selling his pasture raised old school Berkshire pigs. We said yes and a relationship grew that still continues today, now through his son David who has maintained the genetic line of Berkshires which can be traced back to the 17th and 18th century lines that came to these shores by way of the Berkshire region of England.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'San Francisco', 'Segoe UI', Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 0.875rem;\"\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eFrom the air, Newman Farm Berkshire Pork, in south central Missouri, in the heart of the Ozarks, looks more like a pioneer settlement or a holiday camp than any sort of pig farm. Wooden huts are scattered across green fields like bungalows, where contented Berkshire pigs live their lives, happily on-pasture.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'San Francisco', 'Segoe UI', Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 0.875rem;\"\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003ePigs on Newman Farm are raised 100% on-pasture. The sows raise their piglets in huts that dot the fields of the farm. The babies live inside the huts until they are old enough to jump over the 6-inch wooden board that blocks the entrance. Once they make the great leap, they have an entire field to run on and they can mingle with the other piglets from the other huts.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'San Francisco', 'Segoe UI', Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 0.875rem;\"\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eDavid Newman is both a farmer and scientist. “The farmer came first,” he laughs. His degrees are in animal science, and he holds a Ph.D in meat science and muscle biology, focused on meat quality. “As I became a scientist and got involved in education, I applied what I was learning to understand what we could do better.”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'San Francisco', 'Segoe UI', Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 0.875rem;\"\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eBerkshires were the favorite breed of British royalty and were first introduced to the New World in 1823. Since then, Berkshire bloodlines have remained exceptionally pure and have become a mainstay favorite of chefs and diners, legendary for their exceptionally bright pork flavor and thick, delicious fat cap. And if anyone were to question their excellence, just ask David. “It’s not a matter of opinion!” he insists, passionately. “It’s a scientific fact, Berkshires are the most marbled hog on the market today.” David is a master breeder and works hard to keep the lines on his farm separate and he is always working to improve the Berkshire breed on his farm.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'San Francisco', 'Segoe UI', Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 0.875rem;\"\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eDavid lives on the farm with his wife, Kristin, his mom Rita, and his two kids. “I got my start through my family. My parents were hog farmers, but primarily in the commercial pig business. In the 1980s my parents raised pigs in confinement. There were some very challenging economic times for everyone in production, and we realized we were going to have to do something differently. Kristin came from a family farming background also and is a major part of the operations success today, working for the farm along with their team of employees.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'San Francisco', 'Segoe UI', Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 0.875rem;\"\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e“In the 1990s my parents decided they wanted to go back to their roots. We were going to have to be very large to be successful in the commercial sector, and my father decided we should focus on quality. We changed our genetic program and our nutrition program. We became Certified Humane®, and we chose to focus on Berkshire pigs for their quality.”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'San Francisco', 'Segoe UI', Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 0.875rem;\"\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eDavid and his family are the future of American farming! They are young, energetic and very passionate about the future of agriculture. David and Kristin work with a team of farmers who raise their Berkshires to supply Heritage Foods and the national network of chefs who rely on his product for their menus.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'San Francisco', 'Segoe UI', Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 0.875rem;\"\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eLazy Red Wattle Ranch\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eLa Plata, Missouri\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eWe met Larry and Madonna Sorell in 2002, as growers for Frank Reese and the Heritage Turkey Project. As their turkey flock grew in size, so did the Sorell’s importance to Heritage Foods.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eWhen you see Red Wattle pork on a menu, what you are seeing is a five-state, twelve farm network founded by Larry and Madonna, dedicated to raising a storied breed that was once upon a time nearly extinct. Larry and Madonna are the heroes of this story, avatars of the heritage food movement, true believers who were destined to become the Guardians of the Red Wattle. They are proof positive of the ethos that when it comes to endangered livestock, “you have to eat them to save them.”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eIn the beginning, back in 2004 when the Heritage Foods wholesale business began selling pigs, a market for the Red Wattle pig was built on a handshake agreement with chefs Zach Allen and Mark Ladner, then at Lupa Restaurant in NYC. They recognized the high-quality and undiminished taste that came from a Red Wattle pig humanely raised on-pasture and antibiotic free, using traditional farming methods. The deal with Ladner, and the partnership with Larry and his Lazy Red Wattle Ranch, were part of the origins of Heritage Foods.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e“We traveled 18,000 miles to get started,” Larry says matter-of-factly about a Heritage Foods Odyssey whose mission was to search out rare Red Wattle sows and collect a viable genetic lineage of this incredible pig whose American legacy goes back to 18th century New Orleans. \"When we began, we had two Red Wattle gilts and a boar, and we had to travel all over the United States to start a herd.\"\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e“Now I’ve kinda retired from raising animals, but we have a dozen Amish growers working with us, and I pick up the hogs and pay for them, and then bring them to the processor, Paradise Locker. I drive a tractor trailer and go around picking up three hundred pounders, fifty to eighty head a week. We have farms in Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, Iowa... that’s a lot of traveling. We may have four or five pick-ups every week. You wear out a truck pretty fast.”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eLarry, now over eighty, does less of the driving, but he still keeps all the relationships going, which isn’t easy considering the Amish don’t have phones inside their homes! “I’ll have to quit sometime but right now it’s going pretty good. The driving is easy. The hard job is you gotta keep Amish families happy, picking up their hogs, coordinating, monitoring the size of the animals, and making sure we have the right amount — each week we round up 50 to 100 pigs. And we’ve been doing it for almost 20 years now.”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eThanks to Larry and Madonna’s work, the Red Wattle was upgraded to Threatened status from Critical on The Livestock Conservancy’s watch list, a great achievement for the cause of biodiversity, one of the most important issues of our time.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'San Francisco', 'Segoe UI', Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 0.875rem;\"\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eMetzger Farm\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eSeneca, Kansas\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eDoug Metzger's Tamworth and Berkshire genetics are now being shepherded by Robert Funk. Doug sadly passed away in 2023. \u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eDoug Metzger was truly at the ground zero of our business and the heritage food movement. He was the magic man that first introduced us to our processor Paradise Locker Meats, with whom we have worked and grown ever since and he worked together with Frank Reese raising heritage turkeys from about 2002 to 2013.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eAt 83-years-old, Doug raises purebred, certified Berkshire and Tamworth pigs on his 1,500 acre farm in Seneca, Kansas, with his wife Betty.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eIn an era of specialization Doug is an anomaly. Doug is famous for adapting to any moment. In 2001 he took our call and agreed to raise heritage turkeys for us with Frank because he believed that the growing food movement would appreciate the flavor of the birds his grandfather raised. As demand grew for quality meat, Doug got into heritage pigs and transitioned his commodity farm to a pastured farm and haven for the rare Tamworth breed.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eDoug has been farming since 1951. As a kid he raised chickens but gave them up when he got into turkeys. As he got older, he broke into the milk cattle game. Then he tried sheep, but he says he couldn’t get them to breed right. He also raised Aylesbury ducks — a rare heritage breed. Over the years the acres on his sprawling farm have been used to grow wheat, corn, oats, barley, sorghum, alfalfa, and rye. He even grew flax one year because he heard it was supposed to help the immune system of the cattle, which he thought it did. “It certainly made their coats look wonderful,” Doug says.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eToday farmers are incentivized to grow monocrops of corn and soybean — “that’s all they want us to grow,” Doug explains, “and farmers haul their crops to town instead of using it for something on their own farm.” Doug remembers fondly the days when a diversified farm would grow corn and turn it into whiskey, or when soybeans were grown for the purpose of feeding milk cattle — as Doug did on his farm. “Keep your grain,” Doug insists, “and use it to grow a truly sustainable farm.”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eDoug was never one to use chemicals to grow food. He believes any talk of sustainability is not real when you raise only one crop or when you use chemicals to do it. “My buddy and I could clear 100 acres of weeds in a day if we worked through the night, and we did not need any additives to do it. All those chemicals are part of the reason there are so many cancers around, if you ask me.” Doug has amassed generations of farming secrets having grown so many foods naturally, often calling upon experiences from decades ago to solve a problem that presents itself today.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eDoug comes from a truly great American farming family — Life Magazine once wrote that Doug’s father, who lived to be 104, had more living descendants than any American – many of them farmers. His is part of the story of immigrants who came to the New World and made good through old-fashioned values, tradition, and hard work.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e“We’re here today to save these breeds,” says Doug, who is as down-home as the farm he still works on as he approaches his 84th birthday. “Save the breeds and make a little money. We got a lot of things going on, we have a lot of land. But it’s getting hard to keep up with it all… I need more young people! When I was young, we raised turkeys in spring and sold ‘em all by Christmas. We milked cattle all year round. I want to keep working — my dad was helping me when he was 84!”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eHis conversational style always brings insight and interesting thoughts to bear. We hope Doug and Betty work with us for many years to come and that their beliefs of diversified farming continue. Today, his farm is supported through the work of his daughter Marilyn and her husband Stan, and their children Simon and Joel.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'San Francisco', 'Segoe UI', Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 0.875rem;\"\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eGood Farm\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eOlsburg, Kansas\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003eGood Farms' Old Spot, Duroc, and Tamworth genetics are now being shepherded by Dustin and Maria Torneden since Craig and his wife Amy retired in 2024. \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eWe met the Goods through a connection at Kansas State University where Craig’s father was a distinguished professor. Craig spent his life in agriculture growing up in the Flint Hills of Kansas, some of the best agricultural land in the world, perfectly adapted to free ranging livestock, which feed on the perennial grasses that grow there naturally.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eThe Good’s hog operation began in earnest in 1981, and they have continuously raised hogs there for the past 37 years. Their Duroc herd started with a few sows from Craig’s former employer who started raising Duroc pigs in the 1940s — with females obtained through Sears and Roebucks! As Craig explains, “I took a job in 1975 working with an outstanding stockman who raised purebred Duroc pigs here in Kansas. His name was Fred Germann, and he was one of the oldest and best Duroc breeders in the U.S. Things sure have changed since then, but the Durocs that we now raise have ancestry that goes back to those Sears females, approximately 85 years ago.”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eDuroc is an American breed that was used as the foundational genetics for the entire pig industry in the United States because of their good growth rate, body type, and mothering instincts. But big agriculture continued to overbreed the Duroc for certain traits related to higher profits and they crossed it with other pig breeds. Soon the industrial pig became utterly unrecognizable, and it became almost impossible to tell that it had originally derived from Duroc genetics.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eCraig, on the other hand, continued to breed his Durocs to improve their genetics with traits particular to Craig’s preferences, while staying true to the original healthy and hearty breed. Craig always put a lot of thought into which sows he would breed with which boars as he worked to improve meat quality and edibility, as opposed to faster growth. He also selected pigs for the demeanor of the animals, who he treats like members of his own family. Craig bred for strong animals and sought out leaner carcasses (although the Duroc is supremely marbled). He also bred for skeletal size – Craig likes good length of body, for better loin eye size and fat distribution.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eOver the years, the Durocs on Good Farm became his own breed, even though they looked like and acted like true old school Durocs. The Goods continue to bring in new lines to avoid inbreeding, but they work with the lines to continue improving their particular version of the Duroc.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eCraig and Amy also raise Gloucestershire Old Spots and Tamworths, both considered rare breeds.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eCraig's father, Don, was a meat scientist and would eventually have a division of Kansas State University named after him. Together they raised purebred Angus cattle and crops on the farm. “I have had a passion for raising pigs,” says Craig, since taking pigs on as a 4-H project in 1965. Craig studied Animal Science at Kansas State University. “Amy and I were married in 1976 and 5 years later we made the decision to move to the farm that my father and mother had owned since 1961, near Olsburg, Kansas, on 1000 acres of Flint Hills pasture.”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch5\u003eBreed\u003c\/h5\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eRed Wattle\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThreatened: Fewer than 1,000 annual registrations in the United States.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOrigin: 18th Century Louisiana by way of New Caledonia.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFlavor Profile: Described as a cross between pork and beef, Red Wattle is floral and robust, concentrated and bold.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eProducers: A consortium of 18 Amish families in Iowa, Nebraska, Missouri, and Kansas.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHistory: French colonists brought these hogs to New Orleans as a favored meat breed. The Red Wattle eventually would populate the forests of Texas where they were rounded up and brought to the great slaughterhouses of Chicago. Recognized by their signature wattles that hang from the jowl, the Red Wattle resembles Kunekune pigs of New Zealand.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eGloucestershire Old Spot\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThreatened: Fewer than 1,000 annual registrations in the United States.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOrigin: 19th Century Indiana by way of Berkeley Valley of Gloucestershire, England.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFlavor Profile: Described as a charcuterie pig with a delicious milky fat.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eProducers: Craig and Amy Good outside of Manhattan, Kansas.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHistory: Descended from the native old English pigs of western England, this pig was mentioned as early as the 1780's. The spotted pig forages on fallen orchard fruits and other farm by products. Despite their signature oversized floppy ears which hang over their eyes, this gentle pig is hearty and self-reliant.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eTamworth\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThreatened: Fewer than 2,500 annual registrations in the United States.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOrigin: Rossville, Illinois by way of Staffordshire, England by way of Ireland.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFlavor Profile: A premiere bacon producer, Tamworth meat is fruity, earthy, clean, mineral, root, sweet and tender.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eProducers: Doug Metzger and Craig and Amy Good in Kansas.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHistory: The only native red breed to England, its heritage traces back to the wild pigs of Middle Age Europe. A slow growing breed, the Tamworth is active and hearty. Traditionally raised in the woods, the pig's long angular snout makes it an excellent forager — Tamworth pigs do not conform to industrial agriculture needs.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eBerkshire\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOrigin: 1823 Kentucky\/ Illinois by way of Western England and outside London.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFlavor Profile: Sweet with depth of flavor, Berkshire pork is balanced and the most universally loved of all the Heritage breeds.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eProducers: David Newman and a consortium of 12 family farms in Kansas, Missouri and Iowa.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHistory: For years the Royal Family kept a large Berkshire herd at Windsor Castle — our Berkshire pigs are traceable back to these old English genetics. This would eventually become the most popular Heritage breed of pig in the United States because of its supreme marbling. Prized by the Japanese who imported it as \"Kurobuta\" pork, the Berkshire is recognized by 6 white spots at the tip of its feet, nose and tail.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eDuroc\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOrigin: Eastern United States and corn belt by way of the Guinea coast of Africa.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFlavor Profile: Duroc meat is crisp and clean — known for great marbling and polished texture its taste is approachable on the palate.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eProducers: Craig and Amy Good outside Manhattan, Kansas.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHistory: The Duroc is an older breed of American domestic pig that has become one of the most popular breeds because of its great taste and strong genetics, but pure Duroc is very hard to find. Durocs are a red pig strain developed around 1800 in New England and reputed to trace their ancestry back to the early red pigs of Africa. Durocs are especially valued by farmers for their hardiness and quick but thorough muscle growth.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch5\u003eCooking\u003c\/h5\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eGrilling: Remove sausage from its packaging and pat it dry. Fire up your grill and lower to medium heat. Use a knife to score the sausages so they do not burst on the grill. Place the sausages on the grill and cook for 8-10 minutes, turning occasionally to ensure even cooking.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOven Roasting: Preheat the oven to 375ºF. Remove sausage from its packaging and pat it dry. Place it on a rack in a roasting pan and place the pan in the oven.Roast for 15-20 minutes and flip sausages halfway through cooking to ensure even browning on both sides.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e[\/TABS]\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Heritage Foods USA","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":12491082498090,"sku":"424 (3pks)","price":69.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/2602\/4380\/products\/Chicke-sausage2_preview.jpeg?v=1629231161"},{"product_id":"nduja","title":"'NDUJA","description":"[TABS]\n\u003ch5\u003eProduct\u003cbr\u003e\n\u003c\/h5\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e'Nduja\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003eOne 4.5 oz piece\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003eWe are proud to offer this intensely delicious, spreadable salami! It is sweet up front, followed by a subtle but uninhibited heat. We guarantee you’ll find this traditional Calabrian spread an unexpected and unforgettable, bold delicacy.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eIngredients: pork, spices (Calabrian chili pepper), sea salt, lactic acid starter culture.\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eHumanely raised on pasture \u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e100% antibiotic-free\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eRaised by independent family farmers\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003cspan\u003eHeritage pork has more marbling resulting in more tender and juicy meat\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003c\/ul\u003e\n\u003ch5\u003eArtisan\u003c\/h5\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTempesta Artisans, with its signature logo of the Roman Goddess blowing up a storm, is owned and operated by Antonio Fiasche. Tony has taken the food world by storm, emerging as one of the nation’s premiere curemasters thanks to his hard work ethic and refined yet diverse and creative palette.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOn a recent trip to Volo Meats outside Chicago we ate at his restaurant which offers up 50 delicious sandwiches — a menu made all the more remarkable because every single one of the meats had come through Tony’s plant and been artfully enhanced through his seasonings, marinades, aging, and curing processes. From the salami to the smoked turkey to the brisket and prime rib, meatballs, and sausages — even pickles and sauerkraut — everything he sells he adds value to and makes better.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTony started by making ‘nduja, a spicy spreadable salami. He learned the process from his father Agostino who ran an Italian restaurant in Chicago near O’Hare Airport for 45 years. Tony would go on to expand his repertoire, always reinvesting any profits into expansion, including purchasing two-story tall mixers, stuffers, and slicers. Tony’s meats can be found at Whole Foods, Eataly, and distributed by Chefs Warehouse.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eEven while expanding, Tony still remembers the agricultural roots of the products he makes, and from the beginning he has consistently sourced a percentage of his supply from pasture raised heritage breeds from Newman Farm Berkshire Pork and Lazy Red Wattle Ranch including all the Tempesta custom products found on our website, like sliced salami and mortadella.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWe are excited to see Tony move into a new facility in Volo, Illinois that will allow him to produce more in his own space. Volo is a 100-year-old German curehouse that Tony is actively renovating. It has its own maze of aging rooms, an elevator system, a 3-story smoke room, and even a secret tunnel that connects to the storefront!  As Tony grows his sliced salami line and invents new recipes — check out his new holiday roasts this year! — we hope he becomes a regular part of your menus at home!\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch5\u003eFarms\u003c\/h5\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhen Heritage Foods started in 2001 we set out to sell heritage Thanksgiving turkeys. For three years our turkey project grew, but naturally mating turkey is a seasonal food and two of the three farmers we worked with to raise birds were looking for a more regular source of income if they were to continue working with us. So we committed to selling pork, which can be produced year round, as long as the breeds came from historic genetic lines, just like the turkeys. Now, 24 years later, Heritage Foods still works with those two original farms who together introduced the word “heritage pork” to hundreds of America’s best restaurants from coast-to-coast as well as thousands of homes through the Heritage Foods retail website.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eNewman Farm Berkshire Pork\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cem\u003eMyrtle, Missouri\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn 2006 we got a handwritten letter from farmer Mark Newman asking us if Heritage Foods would ever consider selling his pasture raised old school Berkshire pigs. We said yes and a relationship grew that still continues today, now through his son David who has maintained the genetic line of Berkshires which can be traced back to the 17th and 18th century lines that came to these shores by way of the Berkshire region of England.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFrom the air, Newman Farm Berkshire Pork, in south central Missouri, in the heart of the Ozarks, looks more like a pioneer settlement or a holiday camp than any sort of pig farm. Wooden huts are scattered across green fields like bungalows, where contented Berkshire pigs live their lives, happily on-pasture.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePigs on Newman Farm are raised 100% on-pasture. The sows raise their piglets in huts that dot the fields of the farm. The babies live inside the huts until they are old enough to jump over the 6-inch wooden board that blocks the entrance. Once they make the great leap, they have an entire field to run on and they can mingle with the other piglets from the other huts.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDavid Newman is both a farmer and scientist. “The farmer came first,” he laughs. His degrees are in animal science, and he holds a Ph.D in meat science and muscle biology, focused on meat quality. “As I became a scientist and got involved in education, I applied what I was learning to understand what we could do better.”\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBerkshires were the favorite breed of British royalty and were first introduced to the New World in 1823. Since then, Berkshire bloodlines have remained exceptionally pure and have become a mainstay favorite of chefs and diners, legendary for their exceptionally bright pork flavor and thick, delicious fat cap. And if anyone were to question their excellence, just ask David. “It’s not a matter of opinion!” he insists, passionately. “It’s a scientific fact, Berkshires are the most marbled hog on the market today.” David is a master breeder and works hard to keep the lines on his farm separate and he is always working to improve the Berkshire breed on his farm.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDavid lives on the farm with his wife, Kristin, his mom Rita, and his two kids. “I got my start through my family. My parents were hog farmers, but primarily in the commercial pig business. In the 1980s my parents raised pigs in confinement. There were some very challenging economic times for everyone in production, and we realized we were going to have to do something differently. Kristin came from a family farming background also and is a major part of the operations success today, working for the farm along with their team of employees.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e“In the 1990s my parents decided they wanted to go back to their roots. We were going to have to be very large to be successful in the commercial sector, and my father decided we should focus on quality. We changed our genetic program and our nutrition program. We became Certified Humane®, and we chose to focus on Berkshire pigs for their quality.”\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDavid and his family are the future of American farming! They are young, energetic and very passionate about the future of agriculture. David and Kristin work with a team of farmers who raise their Berkshires to supply Heritage Foods and the national network of chefs who rely on his product for their menus.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eLazy Red Wattle Ranch\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cem\u003eLa Plata, Missouri\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWe met Larry and Madonna Sorell in 2002, as growers for Frank Reese and the Heritage Turkey Project. As their turkey flock grew in size, so did the Sorell’s importance to Heritage Foods.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhen you see Red Wattle pork on a menu, what you are seeing is a five-state, twelve farm network founded by Larry and Madonna, dedicated to raising a storied breed that was once upon a time nearly extinct. Larry and Madonna are the heroes of this story, avatars of the heritage food movement, true believers who were destined to become the Guardians of the Red Wattle. They are proof positive of the ethos that when it comes to endangered livestock, “you have to eat them to save them.”\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn the beginning, back in 2004 when the Heritage Foods wholesale business began selling pigs, a market for the Red Wattle pig was built on a handshake agreement with chefs Zach Allen and Mark Ladner, then at Lupa Restaurant in NYC. They recognized the high-quality and undiminished taste that came from a Red Wattle pig humanely raised on-pasture and antibiotic free, using traditional farming methods. The deal with Ladner, and the partnership with Larry and his Lazy Red Wattle Ranch, were part of the origins of Heritage Foods.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e“We traveled 18,000 miles to get started,” Larry says matter-of-factly about a Heritage Foods Odyssey whose mission was to search out rare Red Wattle sows and collect a viable genetic lineage of this incredible pig whose American legacy goes back to 18th century New Orleans. \"When we began, we had two Red Wattle gilts and a boar, and we had to travel all over the United States to start a herd.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e“Now I’ve kinda retired from raising animals, but we have a dozen Amish growers working with us, and I pick up the hogs and pay for them, and then bring them to the processor, Paradise Locker. I drive a tractor trailer and go around picking up three hundred pounders, fifty to eighty head a week. We have farms in Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, Iowa... that’s a lot of traveling. We may have four or five pick-ups every week. You wear out a truck pretty fast.”\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eLarry, now over eighty, does less of the driving, but he still keeps all the relationships going, which isn’t easy considering the Amish don’t have phones inside their homes! “I’ll have to quit sometime but right now it’s going pretty good. The driving is easy. The hard job is you gotta keep Amish families happy, picking up their hogs, coordinating, monitoring the size of the animals, and making sure we have the right amount — each week we round up 50 to 100 pigs. And we’ve been doing it for almost 20 years now.”\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThanks to Larry and Madonna’s work, the Red Wattle was upgraded to Threatened status from Critical on The Livestock Conservancy’s watch list, a great achievement for the cause of biodiversity, one of the most important issues of our time.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eMetzger Farm\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cem\u003eSeneca, Kansas\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDoug Metzger's Tamworth and Berkshire genetics are now being shepherded by Robert Funk. Doug sadly passed away in 2023. \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDoug Metzger was truly at the ground zero of our business and the heritage food movement. He was the magic man that first introduced us to our processor Paradise Locker Meats, with whom we have worked and grown ever since and he worked together with Frank Reese raising heritage turkeys from about 2002 to 2013.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAt 83-years-old, Doug raises purebred, certified Berkshire and Tamworth pigs on his 1,500 acre farm in Seneca, Kansas, with his wife Betty.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn an era of specialization Doug is an anomaly. Doug is famous for adapting to any moment. In 2001 he took our call and agreed to raise heritage turkeys for us with Frank because he believed that the growing food movement would appreciate the flavor of the birds his grandfather raised. As demand grew for quality meat, Doug got into heritage pigs and transitioned his commodity farm to a pastured farm and haven for the rare Tamworth breed.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDoug has been farming since 1951. As a kid he raised chickens but gave them up when he got into turkeys. As he got older, he broke into the milk cattle game. Then he tried sheep, but he says he couldn’t get them to breed right. He also raised Aylesbury ducks — a rare heritage breed. Over the years the acres on his sprawling farm have been used to grow wheat, corn, oats, barley, sorghum, alfalfa, and rye. He even grew flax one year because he heard it was supposed to help the immune system of the cattle, which he thought it did. “It certainly made their coats look wonderful,” Doug says.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eToday farmers are incentivized to grow monocrops of corn and soybean — “that’s all they want us to grow,” Doug explains, “and farmers haul their crops to town instead of using it for something on their own farm.” Doug remembers fondly the days when a diversified farm would grow corn and turn it into whiskey, or when soybeans were grown for the purpose of feeding milk cattle — as Doug did on his farm. “Keep your grain,” Doug insists, “and use it to grow a truly sustainable farm.”\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDoug was never one to use chemicals to grow food. He believes any talk of sustainability is not real when you raise only one crop or when you use chemicals to do it. “My buddy and I could clear 100 acres of weeds in a day if we worked through the night, and we did not need any additives to do it. All those chemicals are part of the reason there are so many cancers around, if you ask me.” Doug has amassed generations of farming secrets having grown so many foods naturally, often calling upon experiences from decades ago to solve a problem that presents itself today.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDoug comes from a truly great American farming family — Life Magazine once wrote that Doug’s father, who lived to be 104, had more living descendants than any American – many of them farmers. His is part of the story of immigrants who came to the New World and made good through old-fashioned values, tradition, and hard work.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e“We’re here today to save these breeds,” says Doug, who is as down-home as the farm he still works on as he approaches his 84th birthday. “Save the breeds and make a little money. We got a lot of things going on, we have a lot of land. But it’s getting hard to keep up with it all… I need more young people! When I was young, we raised turkeys in spring and sold ‘em all by Christmas. We milked cattle all year round. I want to keep working — my dad was helping me when he was 84!”\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHis conversational style always brings insight and interesting thoughts to bear. We hope Doug and Betty work with us for many years to come and that their beliefs of diversified farming continue. Today, his farm is supported through the work of his daughter Marilyn and her husband Stan, and their children Simon and Joel.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eGood Farm\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cem\u003eOlsburg, Kansas\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eGood Farms' Old Spot, Duroc, and Tamworth genetics are now being shepherded by Dustin and Maria Torneden since Craig and his wife Amy retired in 2024. \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWe met the Goods through a connection at Kansas State University where Craig’s father was a distinguished professor. Craig spent his life in agriculture growing up in the Flint Hills of Kansas, some of the best agricultural land in the world, perfectly adapted to free ranging livestock, which feed on the perennial grasses that grow there naturally.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe Good’s hog operation began in earnest in 1981, and they have continuously raised hogs there for the past 37 years. Their Duroc herd started with a few sows from Craig’s former employer who started raising Duroc pigs in the 1940s — with females obtained through Sears and Roebucks! As Craig explains, “I took a job in 1975 working with an outstanding stockman who raised purebred Duroc pigs here in Kansas. His name was Fred Germann, and he was one of the oldest and best Duroc breeders in the U.S. Things sure have changed since then, but the Durocs that we now raise have ancestry that goes back to those Sears females, approximately 85 years ago.”\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDuroc is an American breed that was used as the foundational genetics for the entire pig industry in the United States because of their good growth rate, body type, and mothering instincts. But big agriculture continued to overbreed the Duroc for certain traits related to higher profits and they crossed it with other pig breeds. Soon the industrial pig became utterly unrecognizable, and it became almost impossible to tell that it had originally derived from Duroc genetics.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eCraig, on the other hand, continued to breed his Durocs to improve their genetics with traits particular to Craig’s preferences, while staying true to the original healthy and hearty breed. Craig always put a lot of thought into which sows he would breed with which boars as he worked to improve meat quality and edibility, as opposed to faster growth. He also selected pigs for the demeanor of the animals, who he treats like members of his own family. Craig bred for strong animals and sought out leaner carcasses (although the Duroc is supremely marbled). He also bred for skeletal size – Craig likes good length of body, for better loin eye size and fat distribution.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOver the years, the Durocs on Good Farm became his own breed, even though they looked like and acted like true old school Durocs. The Goods continue to bring in new lines to avoid inbreeding, but they work with the lines to continue improving their particular version of the Duroc.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eCraig and Amy also raise Gloucestershire Old Spots and Tamworths, both considered rare breeds.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eCraig's father, Don, was a meat scientist and would eventually have a division of Kansas State University named after him. Together they raised purebred Angus cattle and crops on the farm. “I have had a passion for raising pigs,” says Craig, since taking pigs on as a 4-H project in 1965. Craig studied Animal Science at Kansas State University. “Amy and I were married in 1976 and 5 years later we made the decision to move to the farm that my father and mother had owned since 1961, near Olsburg, Kansas, on 1000 acres of Flint Hills pasture.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch5\u003eBreed\u003c\/h5\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eRed Wattle\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThreatened: Fewer than 1,000 annual registrations in the United States.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOrigin: 18th Century Louisiana by way of New Caledonia.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFlavor Profile: Described as a cross between pork and beef, Red Wattle is floral and robust, concentrated and bold.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eProducers: A consortium of 18 Amish families in Iowa, Nebraska, Missouri, and Kansas.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHistory: French colonists brought these hogs to New Orleans as a favored meat breed. The Red Wattle eventually would populate the forests of Texas where they were rounded up and brought to the great slaughterhouses of Chicago. Recognized by their signature wattles that hang from the jowl, the Red Wattle resembles Kunekune pigs of New Zealand.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eGloucestershire Old Spots\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThreatened: Fewer than 1,000 annual registrations in the United States.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOrigin: 19th Century Indiana by way of Berkeley Valley of Gloucestershire, England.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFlavor Profile: Described as a charcuterie pig with a delicious milky fat.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eProducers: Craig and Amy Good outside of Manhattan, Kansas.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHistory: Descended from the native old English pigs of western England, this pig was mentioned as early as the 1780's. The spotted pig forages on fallen orchard fruits and other farm by products. Despite their signature oversized floppy ears which hang over their eyes, this gentle pig is hearty and self-reliant.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eTamworth\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThreatened: Fewer than 2,500 annual registrations in the United States.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOrigin: Rossville, Illinois by way of Staffordshire, England by way of Ireland.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFlavor Profile: A premiere bacon producer, Tamworth meat is fruity, earthy, clean, mineral, root, sweet and tender.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eProducers: Doug Metzger and Craig and Amy Good in Kansas.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHistory: The only native red breed to England, its heritage traces back to the wild pigs of Middle Age Europe. A slow growing breed, the Tamworth is active and hearty. Traditionally raised in the woods, the pig's long angular snout makes it an excellent forager — Tamworth pigs do not conform to industrial agriculture needs.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eBerkshire\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOrigin: 1823 Kentucky\/ Illinois by way of Western England and outside London.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFlavor Profile: Sweet with depth of flavor, Berkshire pork is balanced and the most universally loved of all the Heritage breeds.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eProducers: David Newman and a consortium of 12 family farms in Kansas, Missouri and Iowa.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHistory: For years the Royal Family kept a large Berkshire herd at Windsor Castle — our Berkshire pigs are traceable back to these old English genetics. This would eventually become the most popular Heritage breed of pig in the United States because of its supreme marbling. Prized by the Japanese who imported it as \"Kurobuta\" pork, the Berkshire is recognized by 6 white spots at the tip of its feet, nose and tail.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eDuroc\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOrigin: Eastern United States and corn belt by way of the Guinea coast of Africa.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFlavor Profile: Duroc meat is crisp and clean — known for great marbling and polished texture its taste is approachable on the palate.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eProducers: Craig and Amy Good outside Manhattan, Kansas.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHistory: The Duroc is an older breed of American domestic pig that has become one of the most popular breeds because of its great taste and strong genetics, but pure Duroc is very hard to find. Durocs are a red pig strain developed around 1800 in New England and reputed to trace their ancestry back to the early red pigs of Africa. Durocs are especially valued by farmers for their hardiness and quick but thorough muscle growth.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e[\/TABS]\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Heritage Foods USA","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":12544001769514,"sku":"nduja (1 pk receiving 9\/15)","price":16.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/2602\/4380\/products\/nduja_1000.jpg?v=1654286789"},{"product_id":"wagyu-beef-salami","title":"WAGYU BEEF SALAMI","description":"[TABS]\n\u003ch5\u003eProduct\u003cbr\u003e\n\u003c\/h5\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eWagyu Beef Salami\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cspan\u003eOne 4 oz piece, seasoned with thyme, pepper, and Cabernet \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cem\u003eWagyu\u003c\/em\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eCharcuterie lovers know that one cannot live by pork alone. This beef salami brings the full flavor of Japanese Wagyu beef to the ancient art of charcuterie and the result is a remarkably dense salami, with a deep, beefy taste incomparable to its pork counterparts. This Salami di Manzo is produced by Tony Fiasche and Tempesta Artisans in Chicago, IL, where his family has run Ristorante Agostino for 32 years. A dream come true for lovers of beef and salami!\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eIngredients: \u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003ebeef, sea salt, wine, spices, cultured celery powder, dextrose, lactic acid starter culture.\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eAntibiotic and hormone free\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eHeritage meat has more marbling resulting in more tender and juicy meat\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003c\/ul\u003e\n\u003ch5\u003eArtisan\u003cbr\u003e\n\u003c\/h5\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTempesta Artisans, with its signature logo of the Roman Goddess blowing up a storm, is owned and operated by Antonio Fiasche. Tony has taken the food world by storm, emerging as one of the nation’s premiere curemasters thanks to his hard work ethic and refined yet diverse and creative palette.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOn a recent trip to Volo Meats outside Chicago we ate at his restaurant which offers up 50 delicious sandwiches — a menu made all the more remarkable because every single one of the meats had come through Tony’s plant and been artfully enhanced through his seasonings, marinades, aging, and curing processes. From the salami to the smoked turkey to the brisket and prime rib, meatballs, and sausages — even pickles and sauerkraut — everything he sells he adds value to and makes better.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTony started by making ‘nduja, a spicy spreadable salami. He learned the process from his father Agostino who ran an Italian restaurant in Chicago near O’Hare Airport for 45 years. Tony would go on to expand his repertoire, always reinvesting any profits into expansion, including purchasing two-story tall mixers, stuffers, and slicers. Tony’s meats can be found at Whole Foods, Eataly, and distributed by Chefs Warehouse.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eEven while expanding, Tony still remembers the agricultural roots of the products he makes, and from the beginning he has consistently sourced a percentage of his supply from pasture raised heritage breeds from Newman Farm Berkshire Pork and Lazy Red Wattle Ranch including all the Tempesta custom products found on our website, like sliced salami and mortadella.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWe are excited to see Tony move into a new facility in Volo, Illinois that will allow him to produce more in his own space. Volo is a 100-year-old German curehouse that Tony is actively renovating. It has its own maze of aging rooms, an elevator system, a 3-story smoke room, and even a secret tunnel that connects to the storefront!  As Tony grows his sliced salami line and invents new recipes — check out his new holiday roasts this year! — we hope he becomes a regular part of your menus at home!\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch5\u003eFarms\u003c\/h5\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhen Heritage Foods started in 2001 we set out to sell heritage Thanksgiving turkeys. For three years our turkey project grew, but naturally mating turkey is a seasonal food and two of the three farmers we worked with to raise birds were looking for a more regular source of income if they were to continue working with us. So we committed to selling pork, which can be produced year round, as long as the breeds came from historic genetic lines, just like the turkeys. Now, 24 years later, Heritage Foods still works with those two original farms who together introduced the word “heritage pork” to hundreds of America’s best restaurants from coast-to-coast as well as thousands of homes through the Heritage Foods retail website.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eNewman Farm Berkshire Pork\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cem\u003eMyrtle, Missouri\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn 2006 we got a handwritten letter from farmer Mark Newman asking us if Heritage Foods would ever consider selling his pasture raised old school Berkshire pigs. We said yes and a relationship grew that still continues today, now through his son David who has maintained the genetic line of Berkshires which can be traced back to the 17th and 18th century lines that came to these shores by way of the Berkshire region of England.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFrom the air, Newman Farm Berkshire Pork, in south central Missouri, in the heart of the Ozarks, looks more like a pioneer settlement or a holiday camp than any sort of pig farm. Wooden huts are scattered across green fields like bungalows, where contented Berkshire pigs live their lives, happily on-pasture.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePigs on Newman Farm are raised 100% on-pasture. The sows raise their piglets in huts that dot the fields of the farm. The babies live inside the huts until they are old enough to jump over the 6-inch wooden board that blocks the entrance. Once they make the great leap, they have an entire field to run on and they can mingle with the other piglets from the other huts.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDavid Newman is both a farmer and scientist. “The farmer came first,” he laughs. His degrees are in animal science, and he holds a Ph.D in meat science and muscle biology, focused on meat quality. “As I became a scientist and got involved in education, I applied what I was learning to understand what we could do better.”\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBerkshires were the favorite breed of British royalty and were first introduced to the New World in 1823. Since then, Berkshire bloodlines have remained exceptionally pure and have become a mainstay favorite of chefs and diners, legendary for their exceptionally bright pork flavor and thick, delicious fat cap. And if anyone were to question their excellence, just ask David. “It’s not a matter of opinion!” he insists, passionately. “It’s a scientific fact, Berkshires are the most marbled hog on the market today.” David is a master breeder and works hard to keep the lines on his farm separate and he is always working to improve the Berkshire breed on his farm.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDavid lives on the farm with his wife, Kristin, his mom Rita, and his two kids. “I got my start through my family. My parents were hog farmers, but primarily in the commercial pig business. In the 1980s my parents raised pigs in confinement. There were some very challenging economic times for everyone in production, and we realized we were going to have to do something differently. Kristin came from a family farming background also and is a major part of the operations success today, working for the farm along with their team of employees.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e“In the 1990s my parents decided they wanted to go back to their roots. We were going to have to be very large to be successful in the commercial sector, and my father decided we should focus on quality. We changed our genetic program and our nutrition program. We became Certified Humane®, and we chose to focus on Berkshire pigs for their quality.”\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDavid and his family are the future of American farming! They are young, energetic and very passionate about the future of agriculture. David and Kristin work with a team of farmers who raise their Berkshires to supply Heritage Foods and the national network of chefs who rely on his product for their menus.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eLazy Red Wattle Ranch\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cem\u003eLa Plata, Missouri\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWe met Larry and Madonna Sorell in 2002, as growers for Frank Reese and the Heritage Turkey Project. As their turkey flock grew in size, so did the Sorell’s importance to Heritage Foods.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhen you see Red Wattle pork on a menu, what you are seeing is a five-state, twelve farm network founded by Larry and Madonna, dedicated to raising a storied breed that was once upon a time nearly extinct. Larry and Madonna are the heroes of this story, avatars of the heritage food movement, true believers who were destined to become the Guardians of the Red Wattle. They are proof positive of the ethos that when it comes to endangered livestock, “you have to eat them to save them.”\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn the beginning, back in 2004 when the Heritage Foods wholesale business began selling pigs, a market for the Red Wattle pig was built on a handshake agreement with chefs Zach Allen and Mark Ladner, then at Lupa Restaurant in NYC. They recognized the high-quality and undiminished taste that came from a Red Wattle pig humanely raised on-pasture and antibiotic free, using traditional farming methods. The deal with Ladner, and the partnership with Larry and his Lazy Red Wattle Ranch, were part of the origins of Heritage Foods.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e“We traveled 18,000 miles to get started,” Larry says matter-of-factly about a Heritage Foods Odyssey whose mission was to search out rare Red Wattle sows and collect a viable genetic lineage of this incredible pig whose American legacy goes back to 18th century New Orleans. \"When we began, we had two Red Wattle gilts and a boar, and we had to travel all over the United States to start a herd.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e“Now I’ve kinda retired from raising animals, but we have a dozen Amish growers working with us, and I pick up the hogs and pay for them, and then bring them to the processor, Paradise Locker. I drive a tractor trailer and go around picking up three hundred pounders, fifty to eighty head a week. We have farms in Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, Iowa... that’s a lot of traveling. We may have four or five pick-ups every week. You wear out a truck pretty fast.”\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eLarry, now over eighty, does less of the driving, but he still keeps all the relationships going, which isn’t easy considering the Amish don’t have phones inside their homes! “I’ll have to quit sometime but right now it’s going pretty good. The driving is easy. The hard job is you gotta keep Amish families happy, picking up their hogs, coordinating, monitoring the size of the animals, and making sure we have the right amount — each week we round up 50 to 100 pigs. And we’ve been doing it for almost 20 years now.”\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThanks to Larry and Madonna’s work, the Red Wattle was upgraded to Threatened status from Critical on The Livestock Conservancy’s watch list, a great achievement for the cause of biodiversity, one of the most important issues of our time.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eMetzger Farm\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cem\u003eSeneca, Kansas\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDoug Metzger's Tamworth and Berkshire genetics are now being shepherded by Robert Funk. Doug sadly passed away in 2023. \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDoug Metzger was truly at the ground zero of our business and the heritage food movement. He was the magic man that first introduced us to our processor Paradise Locker Meats, with whom we have worked and grown ever since and he worked together with Frank Reese raising heritage turkeys from about 2002 to 2013.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAt 83-years-old, Doug raises purebred, certified Berkshire and Tamworth pigs on his 1,500 acre farm in Seneca, Kansas, with his wife Betty.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn an era of specialization Doug is an anomaly. Doug is famous for adapting to any moment. In 2001 he took our call and agreed to raise heritage turkeys for us with Frank because he believed that the growing food movement would appreciate the flavor of the birds his grandfather raised. As demand grew for quality meat, Doug got into heritage pigs and transitioned his commodity farm to a pastured farm and haven for the rare Tamworth breed.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDoug has been farming since 1951. As a kid he raised chickens but gave them up when he got into turkeys. As he got older, he broke into the milk cattle game. Then he tried sheep, but he says he couldn’t get them to breed right. He also raised Aylesbury ducks — a rare heritage breed. Over the years the acres on his sprawling farm have been used to grow wheat, corn, oats, barley, sorghum, alfalfa, and rye. He even grew flax one year because he heard it was supposed to help the immune system of the cattle, which he thought it did. “It certainly made their coats look wonderful,” Doug says.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eToday farmers are incentivized to grow monocrops of corn and soybean — “that’s all they want us to grow,” Doug explains, “and farmers haul their crops to town instead of using it for something on their own farm.” Doug remembers fondly the days when a diversified farm would grow corn and turn it into whiskey, or when soybeans were grown for the purpose of feeding milk cattle — as Doug did on his farm. “Keep your grain,” Doug insists, “and use it to grow a truly sustainable farm.”\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDoug was never one to use chemicals to grow food. He believes any talk of sustainability is not real when you raise only one crop or when you use chemicals to do it. “My buddy and I could clear 100 acres of weeds in a day if we worked through the night, and we did not need any additives to do it. All those chemicals are part of the reason there are so many cancers around, if you ask me.” Doug has amassed generations of farming secrets having grown so many foods naturally, often calling upon experiences from decades ago to solve a problem that presents itself today.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDoug comes from a truly great American farming family — Life Magazine once wrote that Doug’s father, who lived to be 104, had more living descendants than any American – many of them farmers. His is part of the story of immigrants who came to the New World and made good through old-fashioned values, tradition, and hard work.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e“We’re here today to save these breeds,” says Doug, who is as down-home as the farm he still works on as he approaches his 84th birthday. “Save the breeds and make a little money. We got a lot of things going on, we have a lot of land. But it’s getting hard to keep up with it all… I need more young people! When I was young, we raised turkeys in spring and sold ‘em all by Christmas. We milked cattle all year round. I want to keep working — my dad was helping me when he was 84!”\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHis conversational style always brings insight and interesting thoughts to bear. We hope Doug and Betty work with us for many years to come and that their beliefs of diversified farming continue. Today, his farm is supported through the work of his daughter Marilyn and her husband Stan, and their children Simon and Joel.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eGood Farm\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cem\u003eOlsburg, Kansas\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eGood Farms' Old Spot, Duroc, and Tamworth genetics are now being shepherded by Dustin and Maria Torneden since Craig and his wife Amy retired in 2024. \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWe met the Goods through a connection at Kansas State University where Craig’s father was a distinguished professor. Craig spent his life in agriculture growing up in the Flint Hills of Kansas, some of the best agricultural land in the world, perfectly adapted to free ranging livestock, which feed on the perennial grasses that grow there naturally.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe Good’s hog operation began in earnest in 1981, and they have continuously raised hogs there for the past 37 years. Their Duroc herd started with a few sows from Craig’s former employer who started raising Duroc pigs in the 1940s — with females obtained through Sears and Roebucks! As Craig explains, “I took a job in 1975 working with an outstanding stockman who raised purebred Duroc pigs here in Kansas. His name was Fred Germann, and he was one of the oldest and best Duroc breeders in the U.S. Things sure have changed since then, but the Durocs that we now raise have ancestry that goes back to those Sears females, approximately 85 years ago.”\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDuroc is an American breed that was used as the foundational genetics for the entire pig industry in the United States because of their good growth rate, body type, and mothering instincts. But big agriculture continued to overbreed the Duroc for certain traits related to higher profits and they crossed it with other pig breeds. Soon the industrial pig became utterly unrecognizable, and it became almost impossible to tell that it had originally derived from Duroc genetics.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eCraig, on the other hand, continued to breed his Durocs to improve their genetics with traits particular to Craig’s preferences, while staying true to the original healthy and hearty breed. Craig always put a lot of thought into which sows he would breed with which boars as he worked to improve meat quality and edibility, as opposed to faster growth. He also selected pigs for the demeanor of the animals, who he treats like members of his own family. Craig bred for strong animals and sought out leaner carcasses (although the Duroc is supremely marbled). He also bred for skeletal size – Craig likes good length of body, for better loin eye size and fat distribution.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOver the years, the Durocs on Good Farm became his own breed, even though they looked like and acted like true old school Durocs. The Goods continue to bring in new lines to avoid inbreeding, but they work with the lines to continue improving their particular version of the Duroc.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eCraig and Amy also raise Gloucestershire Old Spots and Tamworths, both considered rare breeds.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eCraig's father, Don, was a meat scientist and would eventually have a division of Kansas State University named after him. Together they raised purebred Angus cattle and crops on the farm. “I have had a passion for raising pigs,” says Craig, since taking pigs on as a 4-H project in 1965. Craig studied Animal Science at Kansas State University. “Amy and I were married in 1976 and 5 years later we made the decision to move to the farm that my father and mother had owned since 1961, near Olsburg, Kansas, on 1000 acres of Flint Hills pasture.”\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch5\u003eBreed\u003c\/h5\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eRed Wattle\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThreatened: Fewer than 1,000 annual registrations in the United States.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOrigin: 18th Century Louisiana by way of New Caledonia.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFlavor Profile: Described as a cross between pork and beef, Red Wattle is floral and robust, concentrated and bold.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eProducers: A consortium of 18 Amish families in Iowa, Nebraska, Missouri, and Kansas.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHistory: French colonists brought these hogs to New Orleans as a favored meat breed. The Red Wattle eventually would populate the forests of Texas where they were rounded up and brought to the great slaughterhouses of Chicago. Recognized by their signature wattles that hang from the jowl, the Red Wattle resembles Kunekune pigs of New Zealand.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eGloucestershire Old Spots\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThreatened: Fewer than 1,000 annual registrations in the United States.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOrigin: 19th Century Indiana by way of Berkeley Valley of Gloucestershire, England.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFlavor Profile: Described as a charcuterie pig with a delicious milky fat.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eProducers: Craig and Amy Good outside of Manhattan, Kansas.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHistory: Descended from the native old English pigs of western England, this pig was mentioned as early as the 1780's. The spotted pig forages on fallen orchard fruits and other farm by products. Despite their signature oversized floppy ears which hang over their eyes, this gentle pig is hearty and self-reliant.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eTamworth\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThreatened: Fewer than 2,500 annual registrations in the United States.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOrigin: Rossville, Illinois by way of Staffordshire, England by way of Ireland.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFlavor Profile: A premiere bacon producer, Tamworth meat is fruity, earthy, clean, mineral, root, sweet and tender.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eProducers: Doug Metzger and Craig and Amy Good in Kansas.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHistory: The only native red breed to England, its heritage traces back to the wild pigs of Middle Age Europe. A slow growing breed, the Tamworth is active and hearty. Traditionally raised in the woods, the pig's long angular snout makes it an excellent forager — Tamworth pigs do not conform to industrial agriculture needs.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eBerkshire\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOrigin: 1823 Kentucky\/ Illinois by way of Western England and outside London.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFlavor Profile: Sweet with depth of flavor, Berkshire pork is balanced and the most universally loved of all the Heritage breeds.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eProducers: David Newman and a consortium of 12 family farms in Kansas, Missouri and Iowa.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHistory: For years the Royal Family kept a large Berkshire herd at Windsor Castle — our Berkshire pigs are traceable back to these old English genetics. This would eventually become the most popular Heritage breed of pig in the United States because of its supreme marbling. Prized by the Japanese who imported it as \"Kurobuta\" pork, the Berkshire is recognized by 6 white spots at the tip of its feet, nose and tail.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eDuroc\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOrigin: Eastern United States and corn belt by way of the Guinea coast of Africa.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFlavor Profile: Duroc meat is crisp and clean — known for great marbling and polished texture its taste is approachable on the palate.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eProducers: Craig and Amy Good outside Manhattan, Kansas.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHistory: The Duroc is an older breed of American domestic pig that has become one of the most popular breeds because of its great taste and strong genetics, but pure Duroc is very hard to find. Durocs are a red pig strain developed around 1800 in New England and reputed to trace their ancestry back to the early red pigs of Africa. Durocs are especially valued by farmers for their hardiness and quick but thorough muscle growth.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'San Francisco', 'Segoe UI', Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 0.875rem;\"\u003e[\/TABS]\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Heritage Foods USA","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":12544237797418,"sku":"beef salami (1 pc)","price":17.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/2602\/4380\/files\/hf_tempesta_salame_de_manzo_1.jpg?v=1682366202"},{"product_id":"sweet-italian-sausage","title":"SWEET ITALIAN SAUSAGE","description":"[TABS]\n\u003ch5\u003eProduct\u003cbr\u003e\n\u003c\/h5\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eSweet Italian Sausage Wheels \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cspan\u003eThree 1lb wheels\u003cbr\u003eCrafted by New York City's own Pepe Giocoli\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eThese Sweet Italian sausages are true classics, embodying the genuine regional flavors of New York City. \u003c\/span\u003eLightly seasoned and \u003cspan\u003ecrafted with higher end cuts than many other sausages\u003c\/span\u003e, they have an outstanding flavor and an incredibly snappy texture.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePepe Giocoli produces New York\/Italian classic sausages using 100% heritage breed pasture raised pork. This is the sausage that can be found throughout Little Italy, at the San Gennaro fair, in Queens, and in Brooklyn — the thin wheel gives each sausage a perfect snap. Pasture raised heritage breeds produce marbled delicious meat, so every bite is sure to be sweet and juicy.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eParma Sausage Co. has been producing the very best New York style sausages from an original family recipe since the 1950's. This is truly the apex of the Italian-American art of sausage making. This is third generation greatness from a no-nonsense artisan who wears his white butcher’s smock like a coat of armor. New York has its own regional cuisine, and these Italian sausages are true classics.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eIngredients: pork, water, salt, dextrose, fennel, flavorings, in sheep casing.\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eHumanely raised on pasture \u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e100% antibiotic-free\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eRaised by independent family farmers\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eHeritage breeds have more marbling resulting in more tender and juicy meat\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003c\/ul\u003e\n\u003ch5\u003eFarms\u003c\/h5\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eWhen Heritage Foods started in 2001 we set out to sell heritage Thanksgiving turkeys. For three years our turkey project grew, but naturally mating turkey is a seasonal food and two of the three farmers we worked with to raise birds were looking for a more regular source of income if they were to continue working with us. So we committed to selling pork, which can be produced year round, as long as the breeds came from historic genetic lines, just like the turkeys. Now, 24 years later, Heritage Foods still works with those two original farms who together introduced the word “heritage pork” to hundreds of America’s best restaurants from coast-to-coast as well as thousands of homes through the Heritage Foods retail website.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'San Francisco', 'Segoe UI', Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 0.875rem;\"\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eNewman Farm Berkshire Pork\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eMyrtle, Missouri\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'San Francisco', 'Segoe UI', Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 0.875rem;\"\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eIn 2006 we got a handwritten letter from farmer Mark Newman asking us if Heritage Foods would ever consider selling his pasture raised old school Berkshire pigs. We said yes and a relationship grew that still continues today, now through his son David who has maintained the genetic line of Berkshires which can be traced back to the 17th and 18th century lines that came to these shores by way of the Berkshire region of England.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'San Francisco', 'Segoe UI', Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 0.875rem;\"\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eFrom the air, Newman Farm Berkshire Pork, in south central Missouri, in the heart of the Ozarks, looks more like a pioneer settlement or a holiday camp than any sort of pig farm. Wooden huts are scattered across green fields like bungalows, where contented Berkshire pigs live their lives, happily on-pasture.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'San Francisco', 'Segoe UI', Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 0.875rem;\"\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003ePigs on Newman Farm are raised 100% on-pasture. The sows raise their piglets in huts that dot the fields of the farm. The babies live inside the huts until they are old enough to jump over the 6-inch wooden board that blocks the entrance. Once they make the great leap, they have an entire field to run on and they can mingle with the other piglets from the other huts.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'San Francisco', 'Segoe UI', Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 0.875rem;\"\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eDavid Newman is both a farmer and scientist. “The farmer came first,” he laughs. His degrees are in animal science, and he holds a Ph.D in meat science and muscle biology, focused on meat quality. “As I became a scientist and got involved in education, I applied what I was learning to understand what we could do better.”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'San Francisco', 'Segoe UI', Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 0.875rem;\"\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eBerkshires were the favorite breed of British royalty and were first introduced to the New World in 1823. Since then, Berkshire bloodlines have remained exceptionally pure and have become a mainstay favorite of chefs and diners, legendary for their exceptionally bright pork flavor and thick, delicious fat cap. And if anyone were to question their excellence, just ask David. “It’s not a matter of opinion!” he insists, passionately. “It’s a scientific fact, Berkshires are the most marbled hog on the market today.” David is a master breeder and works hard to keep the lines on his farm separate and he is always working to improve the Berkshire breed on his farm.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'San Francisco', 'Segoe UI', Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 0.875rem;\"\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eDavid lives on the farm with his wife, Kristin, his mom Rita, and his two kids. “I got my start through my family. My parents were hog farmers, but primarily in the commercial pig business. In the 1980s my parents raised pigs in confinement. There were some very challenging economic times for everyone in production, and we realized we were going to have to do something differently. Kristin came from a family farming background also and is a major part of the operations success today, working for the farm along with their team of employees.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'San Francisco', 'Segoe UI', Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 0.875rem;\"\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e“In the 1990s my parents decided they wanted to go back to their roots. We were going to have to be very large to be successful in the commercial sector, and my father decided we should focus on quality. We changed our genetic program and our nutrition program. We became Certified Humane®, and we chose to focus on Berkshire pigs for their quality.”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'San Francisco', 'Segoe UI', Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 0.875rem;\"\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eDavid and his family are the future of American farming! They are young, energetic and very passionate about the future of agriculture. David and Kristin work with a team of farmers who raise their Berkshires to supply Heritage Foods and the national network of chefs who rely on his product for their menus.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'San Francisco', 'Segoe UI', Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 0.875rem;\"\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eLazy Red Wattle Ranch\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eLa Plata, Missouri\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eWe met Larry and Madonna Sorell in 2002, as growers for Frank Reese and the Heritage Turkey Project. As their turkey flock grew in size, so did the Sorell’s importance to Heritage Foods.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eWhen you see Red Wattle pork on a menu, what you are seeing is a five-state, twelve farm network founded by Larry and Madonna, dedicated to raising a storied breed that was once upon a time nearly extinct. Larry and Madonna are the heroes of this story, avatars of the heritage food movement, true believers who were destined to become the Guardians of the Red Wattle. They are proof positive of the ethos that when it comes to endangered livestock, “you have to eat them to save them.”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eIn the beginning, back in 2004 when the Heritage Foods wholesale business began selling pigs, a market for the Red Wattle pig was built on a handshake agreement with chefs Zach Allen and Mark Ladner, then at Lupa Restaurant in NYC. They recognized the high-quality and undiminished taste that came from a Red Wattle pig humanely raised on-pasture and antibiotic free, using traditional farming methods. The deal with Ladner, and the partnership with Larry and his Lazy Red Wattle Ranch, were part of the origins of Heritage Foods.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e“We traveled 18,000 miles to get started,” Larry says matter-of-factly about a Heritage Foods Odyssey whose mission was to search out rare Red Wattle sows and collect a viable genetic lineage of this incredible pig whose American legacy goes back to 18th century New Orleans. \"When we began, we had two Red Wattle gilts and a boar, and we had to travel all over the United States to start a herd.\"\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e“Now I’ve kinda retired from raising animals, but we have a dozen Amish growers working with us, and I pick up the hogs and pay for them, and then bring them to the processor, Paradise Locker. I drive a tractor trailer and go around picking up three hundred pounders, fifty to eighty head a week. We have farms in Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, Iowa... that’s a lot of traveling. We may have four or five pick-ups every week. You wear out a truck pretty fast.”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eLarry, now over eighty, does less of the driving, but he still keeps all the relationships going, which isn’t easy considering the Amish don’t have phones inside their homes! “I’ll have to quit sometime but right now it’s going pretty good. The driving is easy. The hard job is you gotta keep Amish families happy, picking up their hogs, coordinating, monitoring the size of the animals, and making sure we have the right amount — each week we round up 50 to 100 pigs. And we’ve been doing it for almost 20 years now.”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eThanks to Larry and Madonna’s work, the Red Wattle was upgraded to Threatened status from Critical on The Livestock Conservancy’s watch list, a great achievement for the cause of biodiversity, one of the most important issues of our time.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'San Francisco', 'Segoe UI', Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 0.875rem;\"\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eMetzger Farm\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eSeneca, Kansas\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eDoug Metzger's Tamworth and Berkshire genetics are now being shepherded by Robert Funk. Doug sadly passed away in 2023. \u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eDoug Metzger was truly at the ground zero of our business and the heritage food movement. He was the magic man that first introduced us to our processor Paradise Locker Meats, with whom we have worked and grown ever since and he worked together with Frank Reese raising heritage turkeys from about 2002 to 2013.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eAt 83-years-old, Doug raises purebred, certified Berkshire and Tamworth pigs on his 1,500 acre farm in Seneca, Kansas, with his wife Betty.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eIn an era of specialization Doug is an anomaly. Doug is famous for adapting to any moment. In 2001 he took our call and agreed to raise heritage turkeys for us with Frank because he believed that the growing food movement would appreciate the flavor of the birds his grandfather raised. As demand grew for quality meat, Doug got into heritage pigs and transitioned his commodity farm to a pastured farm and haven for the rare Tamworth breed.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eDoug has been farming since 1951. As a kid he raised chickens but gave them up when he got into turkeys. As he got older, he broke into the milk cattle game. Then he tried sheep, but he says he couldn’t get them to breed right. He also raised Aylesbury ducks — a rare heritage breed. Over the years the acres on his sprawling farm have been used to grow wheat, corn, oats, barley, sorghum, alfalfa, and rye. He even grew flax one year because he heard it was supposed to help the immune system of the cattle, which he thought it did. “It certainly made their coats look wonderful,” Doug says.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eToday farmers are incentivized to grow monocrops of corn and soybean — “that’s all they want us to grow,” Doug explains, “and farmers haul their crops to town instead of using it for something on their own farm.” Doug remembers fondly the days when a diversified farm would grow corn and turn it into whiskey, or when soybeans were grown for the purpose of feeding milk cattle — as Doug did on his farm. “Keep your grain,” Doug insists, “and use it to grow a truly sustainable farm.”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eDoug was never one to use chemicals to grow food. He believes any talk of sustainability is not real when you raise only one crop or when you use chemicals to do it. “My buddy and I could clear 100 acres of weeds in a day if we worked through the night, and we did not need any additives to do it. All those chemicals are part of the reason there are so many cancers around, if you ask me.” Doug has amassed generations of farming secrets having grown so many foods naturally, often calling upon experiences from decades ago to solve a problem that presents itself today.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eDoug comes from a truly great American farming family — Life Magazine once wrote that Doug’s father, who lived to be 104, had more living descendants than any American – many of them farmers. His is part of the story of immigrants who came to the New World and made good through old-fashioned values, tradition, and hard work.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e“We’re here today to save these breeds,” says Doug, who is as down-home as the farm he still works on as he approaches his 84th birthday. “Save the breeds and make a little money. We got a lot of things going on, we have a lot of land. But it’s getting hard to keep up with it all… I need more young people! When I was young, we raised turkeys in spring and sold ‘em all by Christmas. We milked cattle all year round. I want to keep working — my dad was helping me when he was 84!”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eHis conversational style always brings insight and interesting thoughts to bear. We hope Doug and Betty work with us for many years to come and that their beliefs of diversified farming continue. Today, his farm is supported through the work of his daughter Marilyn and her husband Stan, and their children Simon and Joel.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'San Francisco', 'Segoe UI', Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 0.875rem;\"\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eGood Farm\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eOlsburg, Kansas\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003eGood Farms' Old Spot, Duroc, and Tamworth genetics are now being shepherded by Dustin and Maria Torneden since Craig and his wife Amy retired in 2024. \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eWe met the Goods through a connection at Kansas State University where Craig’s father was a distinguished professor. Craig spent his life in agriculture growing up in the Flint Hills of Kansas, some of the best agricultural land in the world, perfectly adapted to free ranging livestock, which feed on the perennial grasses that grow there naturally.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eThe Good’s hog operation began in earnest in 1981, and they have continuously raised hogs there for the past 37 years. Their Duroc herd started with a few sows from Craig’s former employer who started raising Duroc pigs in the 1940s — with females obtained through Sears and Roebucks! As Craig explains, “I took a job in 1975 working with an outstanding stockman who raised purebred Duroc pigs here in Kansas. His name was Fred Germann, and he was one of the oldest and best Duroc breeders in the U.S. Things sure have changed since then, but the Durocs that we now raise have ancestry that goes back to those Sears females, approximately 85 years ago.”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eDuroc is an American breed that was used as the foundational genetics for the entire pig industry in the United States because of their good growth rate, body type, and mothering instincts. But big agriculture continued to overbreed the Duroc for certain traits related to higher profits and they crossed it with other pig breeds. Soon the industrial pig became utterly unrecognizable, and it became almost impossible to tell that it had originally derived from Duroc genetics.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eCraig, on the other hand, continued to breed his Durocs to improve their genetics with traits particular to Craig’s preferences, while staying true to the original healthy and hearty breed. Craig always put a lot of thought into which sows he would breed with which boars as he worked to improve meat quality and edibility, as opposed to faster growth. He also selected pigs for the demeanor of the animals, who he treats like members of his own family. Craig bred for strong animals and sought out leaner carcasses (although the Duroc is supremely marbled). He also bred for skeletal size – Craig likes good length of body, for better loin eye size and fat distribution.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eOver the years, the Durocs on Good Farm became his own breed, even though they looked like and acted like true old school Durocs. The Goods continue to bring in new lines to avoid inbreeding, but they work with the lines to continue improving their particular version of the Duroc.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eCraig and Amy also raise Gloucestershire Old Spots and Tamworths, both considered rare breeds.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eCraig's father, Don, was a meat scientist and would eventually have a division of Kansas State University named after him. Together they raised purebred Angus cattle and crops on the farm. “I have had a passion for raising pigs,” says Craig, since taking pigs on as a 4-H project in 1965. Craig studied Animal Science at Kansas State University. “Amy and I were married in 1976 and 5 years later we made the decision to move to the farm that my father and mother had owned since 1961, near Olsburg, Kansas, on 1000 acres of Flint Hills pasture.”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch5\u003eBreed\u003c\/h5\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eRed Wattle\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThreatened: Fewer than 1,000 annual registrations in the United States.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOrigin: 18th Century Louisiana by way of New Caledonia.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFlavor Profile: Described as a cross between pork and beef, Red Wattle is floral and robust, concentrated and bold.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eProducers: A consortium of 18 Amish families in Iowa, Nebraska, Missouri, and Kansas.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHistory: French colonists brought these hogs to New Orleans as a favored meat breed. The Red Wattle eventually would populate the forests of Texas where they were rounded up and brought to the great slaughterhouses of Chicago. Recognized by their signature wattles that hang from the jowl, the Red Wattle resembles Kunekune pigs of New Zealand.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eGloucestershire Old Spot\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThreatened: Fewer than 1,000 annual registrations in the United States.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOrigin: 19th Century Indiana by way of Berkeley Valley of Gloucestershire, England.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFlavor Profile: Described as a charcuterie pig with a delicious milky fat.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eProducers: Craig and Amy Good outside of Manhattan, Kansas.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHistory: Descended from the native old English pigs of western England, this pig was mentioned as early as the 1780's. The spotted pig forages on fallen orchard fruits and other farm by products. Despite their signature oversized floppy ears which hang over their eyes, this gentle pig is hearty and self-reliant.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eTamworth\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThreatened: Fewer than 2,500 annual registrations in the United States.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOrigin: Rossville, Illinois by way of Staffordshire, England by way of Ireland.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFlavor Profile: A premiere bacon producer, Tamworth meat is fruity, earthy, clean, mineral, root, sweet and tender.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eProducers: Doug Metzger and Craig and Amy Good in Kansas.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHistory: The only native red breed to England, its heritage traces back to the wild pigs of Middle Age Europe. A slow growing breed, the Tamworth is active and hearty. Traditionally raised in the woods, the pig's long angular snout makes it an excellent forager — Tamworth pigs do not conform to industrial agriculture needs.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eBerkshire\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOrigin: 1823 Kentucky\/ Illinois by way of Western England and outside London.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFlavor Profile: Sweet with depth of flavor, Berkshire pork is balanced and the most universally loved of all the Heritage breeds.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eProducers: David Newman and a consortium of 12 family farms in Kansas, Missouri and Iowa.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHistory: For years the Royal Family kept a large Berkshire herd at Windsor Castle — our Berkshire pigs are traceable back to these old English genetics. This would eventually become the most popular Heritage breed of pig in the United States because of its supreme marbling. Prized by the Japanese who imported it as \"Kurobuta\" pork, the Berkshire is recognized by 6 white spots at the tip of its feet, nose and tail.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eDuroc\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOrigin: Eastern United States and corn belt by way of the Guinea coast of Africa.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFlavor Profile: Duroc meat is crisp and clean — known for great marbling and polished texture its taste is approachable on the palate.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eProducers: Craig and Amy Good outside Manhattan, Kansas.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHistory: The Duroc is an older breed of American domestic pig that has become one of the most popular breeds because of its great taste and strong genetics, but pure Duroc is very hard to find. Durocs are a red pig strain developed around 1800 in New England and reputed to trace their ancestry back to the early red pigs of Africa. Durocs are especially valued by farmers for their hardiness and quick but thorough muscle growth.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch5\u003eCooking\u003c\/h5\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eGrilling: Remove sausage from its packaging and pat it dry. Fire up your grill and lower to medium heat. Use a knife to score the sausages so they do not burst on the grill. Place the sausages on the grill and cook for 8-10 minutes, turning occasionally to ensure even cooking.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOven Roasting: Preheat the oven to 375ºF. Remove sausage from its packaging and pat it dry. Place it on a rack in a roasting pan and place the pan in the oven.Roast for 15-20 minutes and flip sausages halfway through cooking to ensure even browning on both sides.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e[\/TABS]\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Heritage Foods USA","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":14298083786794,"sku":"426 (3pks)","price":69.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/2602\/4380\/products\/Parma1.jpg?v=1629232178"},{"product_id":"pepper-and-onion-seasoned-sausage-three-1lb-wheels-parma-sausage-company","title":"PEPPER \u0026 ONION SAUSAGE","description":"[TABS]\n\u003ch5\u003eProduct\u003cbr\u003e\n\u003c\/h5\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003ePepper \u0026amp; Onion Sausage\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cspan\u003eThree 1lb wheels\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCrafted by New York City's own Pepe Giocoli\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOur Pepper \u0026amp; Onion Sausages are lightly seasoned and have an outstanding flavor and an incredibly snappy texture.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePepe Giocoli produces New York\/Italian classic sausages using 100% heritage breed pasture raised pork. This is the sausage that can be found throughout Little Italy, at the San Gennaro fair, in Queens, and in Brooklyn — the thin wheel gives each sausage a perfect snap. Pasture raised heritage breeds produce marbled delicious meat, so every bite is sure to be sweet and juicy.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eParma Sausage Co. has been producing the very best New York style sausages from an original family recipe since the 1950's. This is truly the apex of the Italian-American art of sausage making. This is third generation greatness from a no-nonsense artisan who wears his white butcher’s smock like a coat of armor. New York has its own regional cuisine, and these Italian sausages are true classics.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eIngredients: \u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e \u003cspan\u003epork, peppers, onions, water, salt, dextrose, fennel, flavorings, in sheep casing.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eHumanely raised on pasture \u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e100% antibiotic-free\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eRaised by independent family farmers\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eHeritage breeds have more marbling resulting in more tender and juicy meat\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003c\/ul\u003e\n\u003ch5\u003eFarms\u003c\/h5\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eWhen Heritage Foods started in 2001 we set out to sell heritage Thanksgiving turkeys. For three years our turkey project grew, but naturally mating turkey is a seasonal food and two of the three farmers we worked with to raise birds were looking for a more regular source of income if they were to continue working with us. So we committed to selling pork, which can be produced year round, as long as the breeds came from historic genetic lines, just like the turkeys. Now, 24 years later, Heritage Foods still works with those two original farms who together introduced the word “heritage pork” to hundreds of America’s best restaurants from coast-to-coast as well as thousands of homes through the Heritage Foods retail website.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'San Francisco', 'Segoe UI', Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 0.875rem;\"\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eNewman Farm Berkshire Pork\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eMyrtle, Missouri\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'San Francisco', 'Segoe UI', Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 0.875rem;\"\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eIn 2006 we got a handwritten letter from farmer Mark Newman asking us if Heritage Foods would ever consider selling his pasture raised old school Berkshire pigs. We said yes and a relationship grew that still continues today, now through his son David who has maintained the genetic line of Berkshires which can be traced back to the 17th and 18th century lines that came to these shores by way of the Berkshire region of England.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'San Francisco', 'Segoe UI', Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 0.875rem;\"\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eFrom the air, Newman Farm Berkshire Pork, in south central Missouri, in the heart of the Ozarks, looks more like a pioneer settlement or a holiday camp than any sort of pig farm. Wooden huts are scattered across green fields like bungalows, where contented Berkshire pigs live their lives, happily on-pasture.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'San Francisco', 'Segoe UI', Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 0.875rem;\"\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003ePigs on Newman Farm are raised 100% on-pasture. The sows raise their piglets in huts that dot the fields of the farm. The babies live inside the huts until they are old enough to jump over the 6-inch wooden board that blocks the entrance. Once they make the great leap, they have an entire field to run on and they can mingle with the other piglets from the other huts.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'San Francisco', 'Segoe UI', Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 0.875rem;\"\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eDavid Newman is both a farmer and scientist. “The farmer came first,” he laughs. His degrees are in animal science, and he holds a Ph.D in meat science and muscle biology, focused on meat quality. “As I became a scientist and got involved in education, I applied what I was learning to understand what we could do better.”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'San Francisco', 'Segoe UI', Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 0.875rem;\"\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eBerkshires were the favorite breed of British royalty and were first introduced to the New World in 1823. Since then, Berkshire bloodlines have remained exceptionally pure and have become a mainstay favorite of chefs and diners, legendary for their exceptionally bright pork flavor and thick, delicious fat cap. And if anyone were to question their excellence, just ask David. “It’s not a matter of opinion!” he insists, passionately. “It’s a scientific fact, Berkshires are the most marbled hog on the market today.” David is a master breeder and works hard to keep the lines on his farm separate and he is always working to improve the Berkshire breed on his farm.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'San Francisco', 'Segoe UI', Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 0.875rem;\"\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eDavid lives on the farm with his wife, Kristin, his mom Rita, and his two kids. “I got my start through my family. My parents were hog farmers, but primarily in the commercial pig business. In the 1980s my parents raised pigs in confinement. There were some very challenging economic times for everyone in production, and we realized we were going to have to do something differently. Kristin came from a family farming background also and is a major part of the operations success today, working for the farm along with their team of employees.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'San Francisco', 'Segoe UI', Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 0.875rem;\"\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e“In the 1990s my parents decided they wanted to go back to their roots. We were going to have to be very large to be successful in the commercial sector, and my father decided we should focus on quality. We changed our genetic program and our nutrition program. We became Certified Humane®, and we chose to focus on Berkshire pigs for their quality.”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'San Francisco', 'Segoe UI', Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 0.875rem;\"\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eDavid and his family are the future of American farming! They are young, energetic and very passionate about the future of agriculture. David and Kristin work with a team of farmers who raise their Berkshires to supply Heritage Foods and the national network of chefs who rely on his product for their menus.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'San Francisco', 'Segoe UI', Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 0.875rem;\"\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eLazy Red Wattle Ranch\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eLa Plata, Missouri\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eWe met Larry and Madonna Sorell in 2002, as growers for Frank Reese and the Heritage Turkey Project. As their turkey flock grew in size, so did the Sorell’s importance to Heritage Foods.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eWhen you see Red Wattle pork on a menu, what you are seeing is a five-state, twelve farm network founded by Larry and Madonna, dedicated to raising a storied breed that was once upon a time nearly extinct. Larry and Madonna are the heroes of this story, avatars of the heritage food movement, true believers who were destined to become the Guardians of the Red Wattle. They are proof positive of the ethos that when it comes to endangered livestock, “you have to eat them to save them.”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eIn the beginning, back in 2004 when the Heritage Foods wholesale business began selling pigs, a market for the Red Wattle pig was built on a handshake agreement with chefs Zach Allen and Mark Ladner, then at Lupa Restaurant in NYC. They recognized the high-quality and undiminished taste that came from a Red Wattle pig humanely raised on-pasture and antibiotic free, using traditional farming methods. The deal with Ladner, and the partnership with Larry and his Lazy Red Wattle Ranch, were part of the origins of Heritage Foods.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e“We traveled 18,000 miles to get started,” Larry says matter-of-factly about a Heritage Foods Odyssey whose mission was to search out rare Red Wattle sows and collect a viable genetic lineage of this incredible pig whose American legacy goes back to 18th century New Orleans. \"When we began, we had two Red Wattle gilts and a boar, and we had to travel all over the United States to start a herd.\"\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e“Now I’ve kinda retired from raising animals, but we have a dozen Amish growers working with us, and I pick up the hogs and pay for them, and then bring them to the processor, Paradise Locker. I drive a tractor trailer and go around picking up three hundred pounders, fifty to eighty head a week. We have farms in Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, Iowa... that’s a lot of traveling. We may have four or five pick-ups every week. You wear out a truck pretty fast.”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eLarry, now over eighty, does less of the driving, but he still keeps all the relationships going, which isn’t easy considering the Amish don’t have phones inside their homes! “I’ll have to quit sometime but right now it’s going pretty good. The driving is easy. The hard job is you gotta keep Amish families happy, picking up their hogs, coordinating, monitoring the size of the animals, and making sure we have the right amount — each week we round up 50 to 100 pigs. And we’ve been doing it for almost 20 years now.”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eThanks to Larry and Madonna’s work, the Red Wattle was upgraded to Threatened status from Critical on The Livestock Conservancy’s watch list, a great achievement for the cause of biodiversity, one of the most important issues of our time.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'San Francisco', 'Segoe UI', Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 0.875rem;\"\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eMetzger Farm\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eSeneca, Kansas\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eDoug Metzger's Tamworth and Berkshire genetics are now being shepherded by Robert Funk. Doug sadly passed away in 2023. \u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eDoug Metzger was truly at the ground zero of our business and the heritage food movement. He was the magic man that first introduced us to our processor Paradise Locker Meats, with whom we have worked and grown ever since and he worked together with Frank Reese raising heritage turkeys from about 2002 to 2013.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eAt 83-years-old, Doug raises purebred, certified Berkshire and Tamworth pigs on his 1,500 acre farm in Seneca, Kansas, with his wife Betty.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eIn an era of specialization Doug is an anomaly. Doug is famous for adapting to any moment. In 2001 he took our call and agreed to raise heritage turkeys for us with Frank because he believed that the growing food movement would appreciate the flavor of the birds his grandfather raised. As demand grew for quality meat, Doug got into heritage pigs and transitioned his commodity farm to a pastured farm and haven for the rare Tamworth breed.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eDoug has been farming since 1951. As a kid he raised chickens but gave them up when he got into turkeys. As he got older, he broke into the milk cattle game. Then he tried sheep, but he says he couldn’t get them to breed right. He also raised Aylesbury ducks — a rare heritage breed. Over the years the acres on his sprawling farm have been used to grow wheat, corn, oats, barley, sorghum, alfalfa, and rye. He even grew flax one year because he heard it was supposed to help the immune system of the cattle, which he thought it did. “It certainly made their coats look wonderful,” Doug says.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eToday farmers are incentivized to grow monocrops of corn and soybean — “that’s all they want us to grow,” Doug explains, “and farmers haul their crops to town instead of using it for something on their own farm.” Doug remembers fondly the days when a diversified farm would grow corn and turn it into whiskey, or when soybeans were grown for the purpose of feeding milk cattle — as Doug did on his farm. “Keep your grain,” Doug insists, “and use it to grow a truly sustainable farm.”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eDoug was never one to use chemicals to grow food. He believes any talk of sustainability is not real when you raise only one crop or when you use chemicals to do it. “My buddy and I could clear 100 acres of weeds in a day if we worked through the night, and we did not need any additives to do it. All those chemicals are part of the reason there are so many cancers around, if you ask me.” Doug has amassed generations of farming secrets having grown so many foods naturally, often calling upon experiences from decades ago to solve a problem that presents itself today.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eDoug comes from a truly great American farming family — Life Magazine once wrote that Doug’s father, who lived to be 104, had more living descendants than any American – many of them farmers. His is part of the story of immigrants who came to the New World and made good through old-fashioned values, tradition, and hard work.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e“We’re here today to save these breeds,” says Doug, who is as down-home as the farm he still works on as he approaches his 84th birthday. “Save the breeds and make a little money. We got a lot of things going on, we have a lot of land. But it’s getting hard to keep up with it all… I need more young people! When I was young, we raised turkeys in spring and sold ‘em all by Christmas. We milked cattle all year round. I want to keep working — my dad was helping me when he was 84!”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eHis conversational style always brings insight and interesting thoughts to bear. We hope Doug and Betty work with us for many years to come and that their beliefs of diversified farming continue. Today, his farm is supported through the work of his daughter Marilyn and her husband Stan, and their children Simon and Joel.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'San Francisco', 'Segoe UI', Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 0.875rem;\"\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eGood Farm\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eOlsburg, Kansas\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003eGood Farms' Old Spot, Duroc, and Tamworth genetics are now being shepherded by Dustin and Maria Torneden since Craig and his wife Amy retired in 2024. \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eWe met the Goods through a connection at Kansas State University where Craig’s father was a distinguished professor. Craig spent his life in agriculture growing up in the Flint Hills of Kansas, some of the best agricultural land in the world, perfectly adapted to free ranging livestock, which feed on the perennial grasses that grow there naturally.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eThe Good’s hog operation began in earnest in 1981, and they have continuously raised hogs there for the past 37 years. Their Duroc herd started with a few sows from Craig’s former employer who started raising Duroc pigs in the 1940s — with females obtained through Sears and Roebucks! As Craig explains, “I took a job in 1975 working with an outstanding stockman who raised purebred Duroc pigs here in Kansas. His name was Fred Germann, and he was one of the oldest and best Duroc breeders in the U.S. Things sure have changed since then, but the Durocs that we now raise have ancestry that goes back to those Sears females, approximately 85 years ago.”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eDuroc is an American breed that was used as the foundational genetics for the entire pig industry in the United States because of their good growth rate, body type, and mothering instincts. But big agriculture continued to overbreed the Duroc for certain traits related to higher profits and they crossed it with other pig breeds. Soon the industrial pig became utterly unrecognizable, and it became almost impossible to tell that it had originally derived from Duroc genetics.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eCraig, on the other hand, continued to breed his Durocs to improve their genetics with traits particular to Craig’s preferences, while staying true to the original healthy and hearty breed. Craig always put a lot of thought into which sows he would breed with which boars as he worked to improve meat quality and edibility, as opposed to faster growth. He also selected pigs for the demeanor of the animals, who he treats like members of his own family. Craig bred for strong animals and sought out leaner carcasses (although the Duroc is supremely marbled). He also bred for skeletal size – Craig likes good length of body, for better loin eye size and fat distribution.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eOver the years, the Durocs on Good Farm became his own breed, even though they looked like and acted like true old school Durocs. The Goods continue to bring in new lines to avoid inbreeding, but they work with the lines to continue improving their particular version of the Duroc.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eCraig and Amy also raise Gloucestershire Old Spots and Tamworths, both considered rare breeds.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eCraig's father, Don, was a meat scientist and would eventually have a division of Kansas State University named after him. Together they raised purebred Angus cattle and crops on the farm. “I have had a passion for raising pigs,” says Craig, since taking pigs on as a 4-H project in 1965. Craig studied Animal Science at Kansas State University. “Amy and I were married in 1976 and 5 years later we made the decision to move to the farm that my father and mother had owned since 1961, near Olsburg, Kansas, on 1000 acres of Flint Hills pasture.”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch5\u003eBreed\u003c\/h5\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eRed Wattle\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThreatened: Fewer than 1,000 annual registrations in the United States.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOrigin: 18th Century Louisiana by way of New Caledonia.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFlavor Profile: Described as a cross between pork and beef, Red Wattle is floral and robust, concentrated and bold.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eProducers: A consortium of 18 Amish families in Iowa, Nebraska, Missouri, and Kansas.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHistory: French colonists brought these hogs to New Orleans as a favored meat breed. The Red Wattle eventually would populate the forests of Texas where they were rounded up and brought to the great slaughterhouses of Chicago. Recognized by their signature wattles that hang from the jowl, the Red Wattle resembles Kunekune pigs of New Zealand.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eGloucestershire Old Spot\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThreatened: Fewer than 1,000 annual registrations in the United States.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOrigin: 19th Century Indiana by way of Berkeley Valley of Gloucestershire, England.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFlavor Profile: Described as a charcuterie pig with a delicious milky fat.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eProducers: Craig and Amy Good outside of Manhattan, Kansas.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHistory: Descended from the native old English pigs of western England, this pig was mentioned as early as the 1780's. The spotted pig forages on fallen orchard fruits and other farm by products. Despite their signature oversized floppy ears which hang over their eyes, this gentle pig is hearty and self-reliant.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eTamworth\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThreatened: Fewer than 2,500 annual registrations in the United States.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOrigin: Rossville, Illinois by way of Staffordshire, England by way of Ireland.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFlavor Profile: A premiere bacon producer, Tamworth meat is fruity, earthy, clean, mineral, root, sweet and tender.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eProducers: Doug Metzger and Craig and Amy Good in Kansas.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHistory: The only native red breed to England, its heritage traces back to the wild pigs of Middle Age Europe. A slow growing breed, the Tamworth is active and hearty. Traditionally raised in the woods, the pig's long angular snout makes it an excellent forager — Tamworth pigs do not conform to industrial agriculture needs.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eBerkshire\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOrigin: 1823 Kentucky\/ Illinois by way of Western England and outside London.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFlavor Profile: Sweet with depth of flavor, Berkshire pork is balanced and the most universally loved of all the Heritage breeds.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eProducers: David Newman and a consortium of 12 family farms in Kansas, Missouri and Iowa.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHistory: For years the Royal Family kept a large Berkshire herd at Windsor Castle — our Berkshire pigs are traceable back to these old English genetics. This would eventually become the most popular Heritage breed of pig in the United States because of its supreme marbling. Prized by the Japanese who imported it as \"Kurobuta\" pork, the Berkshire is recognized by 6 white spots at the tip of its feet, nose and tail.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eDuroc\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOrigin: Eastern United States and corn belt by way of the Guinea coast of Africa.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFlavor Profile: Duroc meat is crisp and clean — known for great marbling and polished texture its taste is approachable on the palate.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eProducers: Craig and Amy Good outside Manhattan, Kansas.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHistory: The Duroc is an older breed of American domestic pig that has become one of the most popular breeds because of its great taste and strong genetics, but pure Duroc is very hard to find. Durocs are a red pig strain developed around 1800 in New England and reputed to trace their ancestry back to the early red pigs of Africa. Durocs are especially valued by farmers for their hardiness and quick but thorough muscle growth.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch5\u003eCooking\u003c\/h5\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eGrilling: Remove sausage from its packaging and pat it dry. Fire up your grill and lower to medium heat. Use a knife to score the sausages so they do not burst on the grill. Place the sausages on the grill and cook for 8-10 minutes, turning occasionally to ensure even cooking.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOven Roasting: Preheat the oven to 375ºF. Remove sausage from its packaging and pat it dry. Place it on a rack in a roasting pan and place the pan in the oven.Roast for 15-20 minutes and flip sausages halfway through cooking to ensure even browning on both sides.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e[\/TABS]\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Heritage Foods USA","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":14564644159530,"sku":"429 (3pks)","price":69.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/2602\/4380\/products\/pepe-peppers-onions1048.jpg?v=1558126359"},{"product_id":"garlic-and-broccoli-rabe-heritage-sausage","title":"GARLIC AND BROCCOLI RABE SAUSAGE","description":"[TABS]\n\u003ch5\u003eProduct\u003cbr\u003e\n\u003c\/h5\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eGarlic and Broccoli Rabe Sausage \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003eThree 1lb wheels\u003cem\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/em\u003eCrafted by New York City's own Pepe Giocoli\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePepe Giocoli produces New York\/Italian classic sausages using 100% heritage breed pasture raised pork. This is the sausage that can be found throughout Little Italy, at the San Gennaro fair, in Queens, and in Brooklyn — the thin wheel gives each sausage a perfect snap. Pasture raised heritage breeds produce marbled delicious meat, so every bite is sure to be sweet and juicy.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eEat this sausage on it's own, on a bun, or cut up and tossed in \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/heritagefoods.com\/products\/semolina-artisanal-rigatoni-traditional-slow-dried-full-flavored-dried-organic-durum-semolina-pasta-made-in-the-us-one-1lb-bag?_pos=3\u0026amp;_sid=e7e9b5042\u0026amp;_ss=r\" target=\"_blank\"\u003epasta!\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eParma Sausage Co. has been producing the very best New York style sausages from an original family recipe since the 1950's. This is truly the apex of the Italian-American art of sausage making. This is third generation greatness from a no-nonsense artisan who wears his white butcher’s smock like a coat of armor. New York has its own regional cuisine, and these Italian sausages are true classics.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eIngredients: \u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e \u003cspan\u003epork, broccoli rabe, water, garlic, salt, dextose, fennel, flavorings, in sheep casing.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cul style=\"font-weight: 400;\"\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eHumanely raised on pasture \u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e100% antibiotic-free\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eRaised by independent family farmers\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eHeritage breeds have more marbling resulting in more tender and juicy meat\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003c\/ul\u003e\n\u003ch5\u003eFarms\u003c\/h5\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eWhen Heritage Foods started in 2001 we set out to sell heritage Thanksgiving turkeys. For three years our turkey project grew, but naturally mating turkey is a seasonal food and two of the three farmers we worked with to raise birds were looking for a more regular source of income if they were to continue working with us. So we committed to selling pork, which can be produced year round, as long as the breeds came from historic genetic lines, just like the turkeys. Now, 24 years later, Heritage Foods still works with those two original farms who together introduced the word “heritage pork” to hundreds of America’s best restaurants from coast-to-coast as well as thousands of homes through the Heritage Foods retail website.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'San Francisco', 'Segoe UI', Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 0.875rem;\"\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eNewman Farm Berkshire Pork\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eMyrtle, Missouri\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'San Francisco', 'Segoe UI', Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 0.875rem;\"\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eIn 2006 we got a handwritten letter from farmer Mark Newman asking us if Heritage Foods would ever consider selling his pasture raised old school Berkshire pigs. We said yes and a relationship grew that still continues today, now through his son David who has maintained the genetic line of Berkshires which can be traced back to the 17th and 18th century lines that came to these shores by way of the Berkshire region of England.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'San Francisco', 'Segoe UI', Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 0.875rem;\"\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eFrom the air, Newman Farm Berkshire Pork, in south central Missouri, in the heart of the Ozarks, looks more like a pioneer settlement or a holiday camp than any sort of pig farm. Wooden huts are scattered across green fields like bungalows, where contented Berkshire pigs live their lives, happily on-pasture.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'San Francisco', 'Segoe UI', Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 0.875rem;\"\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003ePigs on Newman Farm are raised 100% on-pasture. The sows raise their piglets in huts that dot the fields of the farm. The babies live inside the huts until they are old enough to jump over the 6-inch wooden board that blocks the entrance. Once they make the great leap, they have an entire field to run on and they can mingle with the other piglets from the other huts.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'San Francisco', 'Segoe UI', Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 0.875rem;\"\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eDavid Newman is both a farmer and scientist. “The farmer came first,” he laughs. His degrees are in animal science, and he holds a Ph.D in meat science and muscle biology, focused on meat quality. “As I became a scientist and got involved in education, I applied what I was learning to understand what we could do better.”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'San Francisco', 'Segoe UI', Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 0.875rem;\"\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eBerkshires were the favorite breed of British royalty and were first introduced to the New World in 1823. Since then, Berkshire bloodlines have remained exceptionally pure and have become a mainstay favorite of chefs and diners, legendary for their exceptionally bright pork flavor and thick, delicious fat cap. And if anyone were to question their excellence, just ask David. “It’s not a matter of opinion!” he insists, passionately. “It’s a scientific fact, Berkshires are the most marbled hog on the market today.” David is a master breeder and works hard to keep the lines on his farm separate and he is always working to improve the Berkshire breed on his farm.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'San Francisco', 'Segoe UI', Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 0.875rem;\"\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eDavid lives on the farm with his wife, Kristin, his mom Rita, and his two kids. “I got my start through my family. My parents were hog farmers, but primarily in the commercial pig business. In the 1980s my parents raised pigs in confinement. There were some very challenging economic times for everyone in production, and we realized we were going to have to do something differently. Kristin came from a family farming background also and is a major part of the operations success today, working for the farm along with their team of employees.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'San Francisco', 'Segoe UI', Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 0.875rem;\"\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e“In the 1990s my parents decided they wanted to go back to their roots. We were going to have to be very large to be successful in the commercial sector, and my father decided we should focus on quality. We changed our genetic program and our nutrition program. We became Certified Humane®, and we chose to focus on Berkshire pigs for their quality.”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'San Francisco', 'Segoe UI', Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 0.875rem;\"\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eDavid and his family are the future of American farming! They are young, energetic and very passionate about the future of agriculture. David and Kristin work with a team of farmers who raise their Berkshires to supply Heritage Foods and the national network of chefs who rely on his product for their menus.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'San Francisco', 'Segoe UI', Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 0.875rem;\"\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eLazy Red Wattle Ranch\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eLa Plata, Missouri\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eWe met Larry and Madonna Sorell in 2002, as growers for Frank Reese and the Heritage Turkey Project. As their turkey flock grew in size, so did the Sorell’s importance to Heritage Foods.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eWhen you see Red Wattle pork on a menu, what you are seeing is a five-state, twelve farm network founded by Larry and Madonna, dedicated to raising a storied breed that was once upon a time nearly extinct. Larry and Madonna are the heroes of this story, avatars of the heritage food movement, true believers who were destined to become the Guardians of the Red Wattle. They are proof positive of the ethos that when it comes to endangered livestock, “you have to eat them to save them.”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eIn the beginning, back in 2004 when the Heritage Foods wholesale business began selling pigs, a market for the Red Wattle pig was built on a handshake agreement with chefs Zach Allen and Mark Ladner, then at Lupa Restaurant in NYC. They recognized the high-quality and undiminished taste that came from a Red Wattle pig humanely raised on-pasture and antibiotic free, using traditional farming methods. The deal with Ladner, and the partnership with Larry and his Lazy Red Wattle Ranch, were part of the origins of Heritage Foods.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e“We traveled 18,000 miles to get started,” Larry says matter-of-factly about a Heritage Foods Odyssey whose mission was to search out rare Red Wattle sows and collect a viable genetic lineage of this incredible pig whose American legacy goes back to 18th century New Orleans. \"When we began, we had two Red Wattle gilts and a boar, and we had to travel all over the United States to start a herd.\"\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e“Now I’ve kinda retired from raising animals, but we have a dozen Amish growers working with us, and I pick up the hogs and pay for them, and then bring them to the processor, Paradise Locker. I drive a tractor trailer and go around picking up three hundred pounders, fifty to eighty head a week. We have farms in Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, Iowa... that’s a lot of traveling. We may have four or five pick-ups every week. You wear out a truck pretty fast.”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eLarry, now over eighty, does less of the driving, but he still keeps all the relationships going, which isn’t easy considering the Amish don’t have phones inside their homes! “I’ll have to quit sometime but right now it’s going pretty good. The driving is easy. The hard job is you gotta keep Amish families happy, picking up their hogs, coordinating, monitoring the size of the animals, and making sure we have the right amount — each week we round up 50 to 100 pigs. And we’ve been doing it for almost 20 years now.”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eThanks to Larry and Madonna’s work, the Red Wattle was upgraded to Threatened status from Critical on The Livestock Conservancy’s watch list, a great achievement for the cause of biodiversity, one of the most important issues of our time.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'San Francisco', 'Segoe UI', Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 0.875rem;\"\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eMetzger Farm\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eSeneca, Kansas\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eDoug Metzger's Tamworth and Berkshire genetics are now being shepherded by Robert Funk. Doug sadly passed away in 2023. \u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eDoug Metzger was truly at the ground zero of our business and the heritage food movement. He was the magic man that first introduced us to our processor Paradise Locker Meats, with whom we have worked and grown ever since and he worked together with Frank Reese raising heritage turkeys from about 2002 to 2013.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eAt 83-years-old, Doug raises purebred, certified Berkshire and Tamworth pigs on his 1,500 acre farm in Seneca, Kansas, with his wife Betty.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eIn an era of specialization Doug is an anomaly. Doug is famous for adapting to any moment. In 2001 he took our call and agreed to raise heritage turkeys for us with Frank because he believed that the growing food movement would appreciate the flavor of the birds his grandfather raised. As demand grew for quality meat, Doug got into heritage pigs and transitioned his commodity farm to a pastured farm and haven for the rare Tamworth breed.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eDoug has been farming since 1951. As a kid he raised chickens but gave them up when he got into turkeys. As he got older, he broke into the milk cattle game. Then he tried sheep, but he says he couldn’t get them to breed right. He also raised Aylesbury ducks — a rare heritage breed. Over the years the acres on his sprawling farm have been used to grow wheat, corn, oats, barley, sorghum, alfalfa, and rye. He even grew flax one year because he heard it was supposed to help the immune system of the cattle, which he thought it did. “It certainly made their coats look wonderful,” Doug says.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eToday farmers are incentivized to grow monocrops of corn and soybean — “that’s all they want us to grow,” Doug explains, “and farmers haul their crops to town instead of using it for something on their own farm.” Doug remembers fondly the days when a diversified farm would grow corn and turn it into whiskey, or when soybeans were grown for the purpose of feeding milk cattle — as Doug did on his farm. “Keep your grain,” Doug insists, “and use it to grow a truly sustainable farm.”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eDoug was never one to use chemicals to grow food. He believes any talk of sustainability is not real when you raise only one crop or when you use chemicals to do it. “My buddy and I could clear 100 acres of weeds in a day if we worked through the night, and we did not need any additives to do it. All those chemicals are part of the reason there are so many cancers around, if you ask me.” Doug has amassed generations of farming secrets having grown so many foods naturally, often calling upon experiences from decades ago to solve a problem that presents itself today.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eDoug comes from a truly great American farming family — Life Magazine once wrote that Doug’s father, who lived to be 104, had more living descendants than any American – many of them farmers. His is part of the story of immigrants who came to the New World and made good through old-fashioned values, tradition, and hard work.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e“We’re here today to save these breeds,” says Doug, who is as down-home as the farm he still works on as he approaches his 84th birthday. “Save the breeds and make a little money. We got a lot of things going on, we have a lot of land. But it’s getting hard to keep up with it all… I need more young people! When I was young, we raised turkeys in spring and sold ‘em all by Christmas. We milked cattle all year round. I want to keep working — my dad was helping me when he was 84!”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eHis conversational style always brings insight and interesting thoughts to bear. We hope Doug and Betty work with us for many years to come and that their beliefs of diversified farming continue. Today, his farm is supported through the work of his daughter Marilyn and her husband Stan, and their children Simon and Joel.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'San Francisco', 'Segoe UI', Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 0.875rem;\"\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eGood Farm\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eOlsburg, Kansas\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003eGood Farms' Old Spot, Duroc, and Tamworth genetics are now being shepherded by Dustin and Maria Torneden since Craig and his wife Amy retired in 2024. \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eWe met the Goods through a connection at Kansas State University where Craig’s father was a distinguished professor. Craig spent his life in agriculture growing up in the Flint Hills of Kansas, some of the best agricultural land in the world, perfectly adapted to free ranging livestock, which feed on the perennial grasses that grow there naturally.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eThe Good’s hog operation began in earnest in 1981, and they have continuously raised hogs there for the past 37 years. Their Duroc herd started with a few sows from Craig’s former employer who started raising Duroc pigs in the 1940s — with females obtained through Sears and Roebucks! As Craig explains, “I took a job in 1975 working with an outstanding stockman who raised purebred Duroc pigs here in Kansas. His name was Fred Germann, and he was one of the oldest and best Duroc breeders in the U.S. Things sure have changed since then, but the Durocs that we now raise have ancestry that goes back to those Sears females, approximately 85 years ago.”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eDuroc is an American breed that was used as the foundational genetics for the entire pig industry in the United States because of their good growth rate, body type, and mothering instincts. But big agriculture continued to overbreed the Duroc for certain traits related to higher profits and they crossed it with other pig breeds. Soon the industrial pig became utterly unrecognizable, and it became almost impossible to tell that it had originally derived from Duroc genetics.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eCraig, on the other hand, continued to breed his Durocs to improve their genetics with traits particular to Craig’s preferences, while staying true to the original healthy and hearty breed. Craig always put a lot of thought into which sows he would breed with which boars as he worked to improve meat quality and edibility, as opposed to faster growth. He also selected pigs for the demeanor of the animals, who he treats like members of his own family. Craig bred for strong animals and sought out leaner carcasses (although the Duroc is supremely marbled). He also bred for skeletal size – Craig likes good length of body, for better loin eye size and fat distribution.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eOver the years, the Durocs on Good Farm became his own breed, even though they looked like and acted like true old school Durocs. The Goods continue to bring in new lines to avoid inbreeding, but they work with the lines to continue improving their particular version of the Duroc.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eCraig and Amy also raise Gloucestershire Old Spots and Tamworths, both considered rare breeds.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eCraig's father, Don, was a meat scientist and would eventually have a division of Kansas State University named after him. Together they raised purebred Angus cattle and crops on the farm. “I have had a passion for raising pigs,” says Craig, since taking pigs on as a 4-H project in 1965. Craig studied Animal Science at Kansas State University. “Amy and I were married in 1976 and 5 years later we made the decision to move to the farm that my father and mother had owned since 1961, near Olsburg, Kansas, on 1000 acres of Flint Hills pasture.”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch5\u003eBreed\u003c\/h5\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eRed Wattle\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThreatened: Fewer than 1,000 annual registrations in the United States.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOrigin: 18th Century Louisiana by way of New Caledonia.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFlavor Profile: Described as a cross between pork and beef, Red Wattle is floral and robust, concentrated and bold.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eProducers: A consortium of 18 Amish families in Iowa, Nebraska, Missouri, and Kansas.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHistory: French colonists brought these hogs to New Orleans as a favored meat breed. The Red Wattle eventually would populate the forests of Texas where they were rounded up and brought to the great slaughterhouses of Chicago. Recognized by their signature wattles that hang from the jowl, the Red Wattle resembles Kunekune pigs of New Zealand.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eGloucestershire Old Spot\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThreatened: Fewer than 1,000 annual registrations in the United States.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOrigin: 19th Century Indiana by way of Berkeley Valley of Gloucestershire, England.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFlavor Profile: Described as a charcuterie pig with a delicious milky fat.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eProducers: Craig and Amy Good outside of Manhattan, Kansas.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHistory: Descended from the native old English pigs of western England, this pig was mentioned as early as the 1780's. The spotted pig forages on fallen orchard fruits and other farm by products. Despite their signature oversized floppy ears which hang over their eyes, this gentle pig is hearty and self-reliant.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eTamworth\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThreatened: Fewer than 2,500 annual registrations in the United States.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOrigin: Rossville, Illinois by way of Staffordshire, England by way of Ireland.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFlavor Profile: A premiere bacon producer, Tamworth meat is fruity, earthy, clean, mineral, root, sweet and tender.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eProducers: Doug Metzger and Craig and Amy Good in Kansas.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHistory: The only native red breed to England, its heritage traces back to the wild pigs of Middle Age Europe. A slow growing breed, the Tamworth is active and hearty. Traditionally raised in the woods, the pig's long angular snout makes it an excellent forager — Tamworth pigs do not conform to industrial agriculture needs.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eBerkshire\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOrigin: 1823 Kentucky\/ Illinois by way of Western England and outside London.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFlavor Profile: Sweet with depth of flavor, Berkshire pork is balanced and the most universally loved of all the Heritage breeds.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eProducers: David Newman and a consortium of 12 family farms in Kansas, Missouri and Iowa.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHistory: For years the Royal Family kept a large Berkshire herd at Windsor Castle — our Berkshire pigs are traceable back to these old English genetics. This would eventually become the most popular Heritage breed of pig in the United States because of its supreme marbling. Prized by the Japanese who imported it as \"Kurobuta\" pork, the Berkshire is recognized by 6 white spots at the tip of its feet, nose and tail.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eDuroc\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOrigin: Eastern United States and corn belt by way of the Guinea coast of Africa.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFlavor Profile: Duroc meat is crisp and clean — known for great marbling and polished texture its taste is approachable on the palate.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eProducers: Craig and Amy Good outside Manhattan, Kansas.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHistory: The Duroc is an older breed of American domestic pig that has become one of the most popular breeds because of its great taste and strong genetics, but pure Duroc is very hard to find. Durocs are a red pig strain developed around 1800 in New England and reputed to trace their ancestry back to the early red pigs of Africa. Durocs are especially valued by farmers for their hardiness and quick but thorough muscle growth.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch5\u003eCooking\u003c\/h5\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eGrilling: Remove sausage from its packaging and pat it dry. Fire up your grill and lower to medium heat. Use a knife to score the sausages so they do not burst on the grill. Place the sausages on the grill and cook for 8-10 minutes, turning occasionally to ensure even cooking.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOven Roasting: Preheat the oven to 375ºF. Remove sausage from its packaging and pat it dry. Place it on a rack in a roasting pan and place the pan in the oven.Roast for 15-20 minutes and flip sausages halfway through cooking to ensure even browning on both sides.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e[\/TABS]\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Heritage Foods USA","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39257710821434,"sku":"427 (3pk)","price":69.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/2602\/4380\/products\/hf_broccoli_rabe_sausage_ecomm_1.jpg?v=1630095170"},{"product_id":"sweet-italian-heritage-turkey-sausage","title":"TURKEY SWEET ITALIAN SAUSAGE — NOW 25% OFF","description":"[TABS]\n\u003ch5\u003eProduct\u003cbr\u003e\n\u003c\/h5\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eTurkey Sausage Wheels with Sweet Italian Seasoning\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cspan\u003eThree 1lb wheels\u003cbr\u003eCrafted by New York City's own Pepe Giocoli\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"p1\"\u003e\u003ci\u003eAdditional discounts cannot be applied to sale items. Sale products must ship immediately.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWe are sure you will love our Good Shepherd Ranch heritage turkey sausage produced by one of the premiere artisans in the U.S.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eThese Sweet Italian sausages are true classics, embodying the genuine regional flavors of New York City, but made with heritage turkey! \u003c\/span\u003eLightly seasoned, they have an outstanding flavor and an incredibly snappy texture.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cspan\u003eFrank Reese turkeys provide the perfect ingredient for these Italian style recipes that are sure to become an annual tradition in our holiday catalog and at your table! \u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThese rare and endangered turkeys have been bred by Frank Reese on the Good Shepherd Ranch in Kansas, the only remaining commercial USDA certified Standardbred heritage poultry farm in the U.S. Good Shepherd turkeys comprise the oldest continuous breeding lines of turkeys in North America and all are raised to these standards: \u003cem\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eCertified Standardbred, Pasture Raised, Free Ranging Flock, Vegetarian Fed, and Naturally Mating.\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePepe Giocoli produces New York\/Italian classic sausages using 100% heritage breed pasture raised meat. The thin wheel gives each sausage a perfect snap. Pasture raised heritage breeds produce marbled delicious meat, so every bite is sure to be sweet and juicy.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eParma Sausage Co. has been producing the very best New York style sausages from an original family recipe since the 1950's. This is truly the apex of the Italian-American art of sausage making. This is third generation greatness from a no-nonsense artisan who wears his white butcher’s smock like a coat of armor. New York has its own regional cuisine, and these Italian sausages are true classics.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eIngredients: \u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003eTurkey, water, salt, dextrose, flavorings. In sheep casing.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eHumanely raised on pasture \u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e100% antibiotic-free\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eRaised by independent family farmers\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eHeritage breeds have more marbling resulting in more tender and juicy meat\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003c\/ul\u003e\n\u003ch5\u003eFarm\u003c\/h5\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eGood Shepherd Poultry Ranch is one of the most important farms in the world. Every morning at sunrise, for more than 50 years — in rain, snow, deep cold and heat — Frank Reese opens the massive doors of the huge barns that house his few thousand birds, starting a trickle, then a wave, of chickens and turkeys who will free range the hundred-acre property for the day, before they are shepherded back indoors at night. These birds are truly free range and spend their time walking, picking the fields for food, naturally reproducing, and flying onto trees and fence tops. And they are truly from old stock — on this farm in Kansas live some of the last chickens and turkeys from a time before factory farming took over our food system. They are all endangered breeds.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eRight before our eyes, dozens of our foundational poultry breeds are on the brink of extinction. These strains’ importance to America’s culture, food safety, and biodiversity is incalculable. Their loss would spell disaster for the future of the sustainable food system.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhile most remain unaware of the looming extinction of Standardbred poultry breeds in the United States, there is a small community working to combat this crisis. One man on the plains of the Kansas prairie stands out as their greatest champion. Frank, in his seventies, is the sole remaining commercial breeder of Certified Standardbred poultry in the United States.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHis Good Shepherd Poultry Ranch stands as the last remaining stronghold for many of America’s most important market breeds of chickens and turkeys with lineages dating back to the 19th and early 20th century including Plymouth Rock, New Hampshire, Rhode Island White, Cornish, Leghorn, Minorca, Bronze, Narragansett, White Holland and Bourbon Red.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHaving only one commercial farm left in the country to protect these natural treasures leaves them extremely vulnerable. In order to provide a safe future for these breeds, we must drastically increase their numbers. To address this issue, Frank Reese has started a nationwide conservation effort which will increase 10 breeds’ numbers to 100,000+ birds and spread them out over hundreds of farms throughout the United States. Heritage Foods, together with the Good Shepherd Conservancy, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, are building a center to train farmers, to grow a larger hatchery to produce more birds, and to bring visitors from around the world to learn about this important issue.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe agri-tourism site being built on the farm will allow consumers, chefs, and farmers to visit for themselves the world site that is Good Shepherd Ranch. There is a collage of multicolored feathers on Franks farms, from birds that each boast a unique history, taste, and flavor. The Bronze turkey for example shimmers with its coppery, bronze-colored metallic sheen and has origins in Rhode Island —it is the foundation for all domestic turkeys in the United States and the closest connection we have to the origin of the domesticated turkey.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe Barred Rock chicken, with its beautiful white and black barred feather pattern, is the foundation of the chicken industry and was raised by the millions from 1870 -1950. They remained king of the industry until they were replaced by the industrial Cornish. They say the original Barred Rock has never been beat in a tasting contest. As an animal it is hearty, tough and reliable as well as lovely to look at.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt’s remarkable to think that almost every bird in the United States comes from the same genetic stock, derived from the same two or three industrial hatcheries producing unhealthy birds that cannot fly or survive in nature, and that have been built to die after only two or three years. The baby poults being supplied to farms large and small are a far cry from their healthy ancestors. They have not been genetically modified, like seed companies do, but they have been so overbred for certain traits like large breast size, fast growth, and small legs that they must be fed antibiotics and kept indoors to survive. The technology does not exist to freeze poultry sperm, so rare breeds must continue to reproduce their flocks on the farm, generation to generation, making Frank’s place in the world all the more important.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhen Heritage Foods first started we sold only heritage turkeys from Good Shepherd Poultry Ranch. We learned about them through the Slow Food Ark of Taste Project designed to save foods on the brink of extinction. The story of Frank was so compelling to us — his birds came to him from his mentor Norman Kardosh who inherited the birds from his Mother who had received heritage eggs by train from the Bird Brothers Hatchery in the 1860s.  The birds Frank raises are essentially descended from stock that have only ever lived on the same two farms for more than 100 years! When we came to understand all these details, and that Frank was the last of his kind, just like so many of the birds on his farm — we had to do something!\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThrough sales direct to homes and to restaurant chefs, markets, and butchers we have managed to lay a stake in the ground claiming that we will not lose these birds to history and that fast food will not overtake our entire food supply!  Thank you to all the buyers who have made this conservation effort a success story, all the while enjoying by far the tastiest birds on the market today!\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch5\u003eBreed\u003c\/h5\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cb\u003eStandard Bronze\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe Bronze is the patriarch of all American turkey varieties in existence today. Carrying the genes of every other breed on our list, this bird holds the key to preserving the American Standardbred turkey. A great forager with a strong immune system and tolerant of extreme cold, quality and resilience have helped the Standard Bronze stand the test of time.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eNarragansett\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis breed of turkey is likely the second oldest on our list. A natural mutation from the Bronze, it was developed by turkey farmers in the Narragansett region of Rhode Island in the 1800s. Beautiful silver and buff feathering, cold tolerance, and delicious flavor all make this historic bird very worthy of protection.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eWhite Holland\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe history of this noble breed stretches hundreds of years back, when it naturally mutated from the Bronze, much as the Narragansett did. Historically disfavored due to its white feathering, this attribute now makes it essential in the modern marketplace which favors white feathered birds. A healthy and robust bird with great potential and a storied past, we must conserve the White Holland to meet the needs of today’s picky consumers.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eBourbon Red\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis is the newest breed of turkey that we are seeking sponsorship for. Developed in the early 1900s, this chestnut-red bird’s slow growth and slightly smaller stature make it more heat tolerant than the other turkeys on our list. Notably, the Bourbon Red was chosen by Marian Burros of the New York Times as the tastiest turkey in America, sparking a resurgence of interest in Standardbred turkeys throughout the United States.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch5\u003eCooking\u003c\/h5\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eGrilling: Remove sausage from its packaging and pat it dry. Fire up your grill and lower to medium heat. Use a knife to score the sausages so they do not burst on the grill. Place the sausages on the grill and cook for 8-10 minutes, turning occasionally to ensure even cooking.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOven Roasting: Preheat the oven to 375ºF. Remove sausage from its packaging and pat it dry. Place it on a rack in a roasting pan and place the pan in the oven.Roast for 15-20 minutes and flip sausages halfway through cooking to ensure even browning on both sides.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e[\/TABS]\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Heritage Foods USA","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39797618245690,"sku":"3pk turkey sweet italian","price":54.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/2602\/4380\/products\/hf_turkey_sausage_sweet_italian_3.jpg?v=1670265492"},{"product_id":"sweet-italian-heritage-turkey-sausage-with-provolone-and-cherry-peppers","title":"TURKEY SAUSAGE WITH PROVOLONE AND CHERRY PEPPERS — NOW 25% OFF","description":"[TABS]\n\u003ch5\u003eProduct\u003cbr\u003e\n\u003c\/h5\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eTurkey Sausage Wheels with Provolone and Cherry Peppers\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cspan\u003eThree 1lb wheels\u003cbr\u003eCrafted by New York City's own Pepe Giocoli\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"p1\"\u003e\u003ci\u003eAdditional discounts cannot be applied to sale items. Sale products must ship immediately.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTo celebrate 20 years, we are proud to introduce a Heritage Turkey first! We are sure you will love our Good Shepherd Ranch heritage turkey sausage produced by one of the premiere artisans in the U.S.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eThese Sweet Italian sausages with provolone cheese and cherry peppers are true classics, embodying the genuine regional flavors of New York City. \u003c\/span\u003eLightly seasoned, they have an outstanding flavor and an incredibly snappy texture.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cspan\u003eFrank Reese turkeys provide the perfect ingredient for these Italian style recipes that are sure to become an annual tradition in our holiday catalog and at your table! \u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThese rare and endangered turkeys have been bred by Frank Reese on the Good Shepherd Ranch in Kansas, the only remaining commercial USDA certified Standardbred heritage poultry farm in the U.S. Good Shepherd turkeys comprise the oldest continuous breeding lines of turkeys in North America and all are raised to these standards: \u003cem\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eCertified Standardbred, Pasture Raised, Free Ranging Flock, Vegetarian Fed, and Naturally Mating. \u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePepe Giocoli produces New York\/Italian classic sausages using 100% heritage breed pasture raised meat. The thin wheel gives each sausage a perfect snap. Pasture raised heritage breeds produce marbled delicious meat, so every bite is sure to be sweet and juicy.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eParma Sausage Co. has been producing the very best New York style sausages from an original family recipe since the 1950's. This is truly the apex of the Italian-American art of sausage making. This is third generation greatness from a no-nonsense artisan who wears his white butcher’s smock like a coat of armor. New York has its own regional cuisine, and these Italian sausages are true classics.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIngredients: \u003cspan\u003eTurkey, water, salt, provolone cheese (pasteurized milk, culture, rennet, salt), cherry peppers, dextrose, flavorings. In sheep casing.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eHumanely raised on pasture \u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e100% antibiotic-free\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eRaised by independent family farmers\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eHeritage breeds have more marbling resulting in more tender and juicy meat\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003c\/ul\u003e\n\u003ch5\u003eFarm\u003c\/h5\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eGood Shepherd Poultry Ranch is one of the most important farms in the world. Every morning at sunrise, for more than 50 years — in rain, snow, deep cold and heat — Frank Reese opens the massive doors of the huge barns that house his few thousand birds, starting a trickle, then a wave, of chickens and turkeys who will free range the hundred-acre property for the day, before they are shepherded back indoors at night. These birds are truly free range and spend their time walking, picking the fields for food, naturally reproducing, and flying onto trees and fence tops. And they are truly from old stock — on this farm in Kansas live some of the last chickens and turkeys from a time before factory farming took over our food system. They are all endangered breeds.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eRight before our eyes, dozens of our foundational poultry breeds are on the brink of extinction. These strains’ importance to America’s culture, food safety, and biodiversity is incalculable. Their loss would spell disaster for the future of the sustainable food system.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhile most remain unaware of the looming extinction of Standardbred poultry breeds in the United States, there is a small community working to combat this crisis. One man on the plains of the Kansas prairie stands out as their greatest champion. Frank, in his seventies, is the sole remaining commercial breeder of Certified Standardbred poultry in the United States.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHis Good Shepherd Poultry Ranch stands as the last remaining stronghold for many of America’s most important market breeds of chickens and turkeys with lineages dating back to the 19th and early 20th century including Plymouth Rock, New Hampshire, Rhode Island White, Cornish, Leghorn, Minorca, Bronze, Narragansett, White Holland and Bourbon Red.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHaving only one commercial farm left in the country to protect these natural treasures leaves them extremely vulnerable. In order to provide a safe future for these breeds, we must drastically increase their numbers. To address this issue, Frank Reese has started a nationwide conservation effort which will increase 10 breeds’ numbers to 100,000+ birds and spread them out over hundreds of farms throughout the United States. Heritage Foods, together with the Good Shepherd Conservancy, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, are building a center to train farmers, to grow a larger hatchery to produce more birds, and to bring visitors from around the world to learn about this important issue.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe agri-tourism site being built on the farm will allow consumers, chefs, and farmers to visit for themselves the world site that is Good Shepherd Ranch. There is a collage of multicolored feathers on Franks farms, from birds that each boast a unique history, taste, and flavor. The Bronze turkey for example shimmers with its coppery, bronze-colored metallic sheen and has origins in Rhode Island —it is the foundation for all domestic turkeys in the United States and the closest connection we have to the origin of the domesticated turkey.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe Barred Rock chicken, with its beautiful white and black barred feather pattern, is the foundation of the chicken industry and was raised by the millions from 1870 -1950. They remained king of the industry until they were replaced by the industrial Cornish. They say the original Barred Rock has never been beat in a tasting contest. As an animal it is hearty, tough and reliable as well as lovely to look at.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt’s remarkable to think that almost every bird in the United States comes from the same genetic stock, derived from the same two or three industrial hatcheries producing unhealthy birds that cannot fly or survive in nature, and that have been built to die after only two or three years. The baby poults being supplied to farms large and small are a far cry from their healthy ancestors. They have not been genetically modified, like seed companies do, but they have been so overbred for certain traits like large breast size, fast growth, and small legs that they must be fed antibiotics and kept indoors to survive. The technology does not exist to freeze poultry sperm, so rare breeds must continue to reproduce their flocks on the farm, generation to generation, making Frank’s place in the world all the more important.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhen Heritage Foods first started we sold only heritage turkeys from Good Shepherd Poultry Ranch. We learned about them through the Slow Food Ark of Taste Project designed to save foods on the brink of extinction. The story of Frank was so compelling to us — his birds came to him from his mentor Norman Kardosh who inherited the birds from his Mother who had received heritage eggs by train from the Bird Brothers Hatchery in the 1860s.  The birds Frank raises are essentially descended from stock that have only ever lived on the same two farms for more than 100 years! When we came to understand all these details, and that Frank was the last of his kind, just like so many of the birds on his farm — we had to do something!\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThrough sales direct to homes and to restaurant chefs, markets, and butchers we have managed to lay a stake in the ground claiming that we will not lose these birds to history and that fast food will not overtake our entire food supply!  Thank you to all the buyers who have made this conservation effort a success story, all the while enjoying by far the tastiest birds on the market today!\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch5\u003eBreed\u003c\/h5\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cb\u003eStandard Bronze\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe Bronze is the patriarch of all American turkey varieties in existence today. Carrying the genes of every other breed on our list, this bird holds the key to preserving the American Standardbred turkey. A great forager with a strong immune system and tolerant of extreme cold, quality and resilience have helped the Standard Bronze stand the test of time.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eNarragansett\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis breed of turkey is likely the second oldest on our list. A natural mutation from the Bronze, it was developed by turkey farmers in the Narragansett region of Rhode Island in the 1800s. Beautiful silver and buff feathering, cold tolerance, and delicious flavor all make this historic bird very worthy of protection.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eWhite Holland\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe history of this noble breed stretches hundreds of years back, when it naturally mutated from the Bronze, much as the Narragansett did. Historically disfavored due to its white feathering, this attribute now makes it essential in the modern marketplace which favors white feathered birds. A healthy and robust bird with great potential and a storied past, we must conserve the White Holland to meet the needs of today’s picky consumers.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eBourbon Red\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis is the newest breed of turkey that we are seeking sponsorship for. Developed in the early 1900s, this chestnut-red bird’s slow growth and slightly smaller stature make it more heat tolerant than the other turkeys on our list. Notably, the Bourbon Red was chosen by Marian Burros of the New York Times as the tastiest turkey in America, sparking a resurgence of interest in Standardbred turkeys throughout the United States.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch5\u003eCooking\u003c\/h5\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eGrilling: Remove sausage from its packaging and pat it dry. Fire up your grill and lower to medium heat. Use a knife to score the sausages so they do not burst on the grill. Place the sausages on the grill and cook for 8-10 minutes, turning occasionally to ensure even cooking.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOven Roasting: Preheat the oven to 375ºF. Remove sausage from its packaging and pat it dry. Place it on a rack in a roasting pan and place the pan in the oven.Roast for 15-20 minutes and flip sausages halfway through cooking to ensure even browning on both sides.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e[\/TABS]\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Heritage Foods USA","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39797631254586,"sku":"3pk Turkey Wheel with Provolone","price":54.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/2602\/4380\/products\/hf_turkey_sausage_cherry_pepper_4.jpg?v=1670266170"},{"product_id":"pre-sliced-finocchiona-salami","title":"PRE-SLICED FINOCCHIONA SALAMI","description":"[TABS]\n\u003ch5\u003eProduct\u003cbr\u003e\n\u003c\/h5\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003ePre-Sliced Finocchiona Salami\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cspan\u003eOne 3 oz pack\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eExclusively made from 100% Lazy Red Wattle Ranch and Newman Farm Berkshire pork and aged by the great Antonio Fiasche of Tempesta Artisans. \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003eFinocchiona meaning “fennel salame” is identified closely with the region of Tuscany. \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003eTempesta compliments this finocchiona with black pepper, Sangiovese wine, a sprinkling of whole fennel seed, and a blast of wild fennel pollen. The addition of whole fennel seeds show beautifully and add textural dynamics to each slice, while the wild fennel pollen perfumes the senses with the aroma of sweet anise. \u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eThis sliced salami lasts for 1 year unopened in the refrigerator and has no nitrates or nitrites except those naturally occurring in sea salt and cultured celery powder.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eIngredients: pork, sea salt, spices, wine, cultured celery powder, dextrose, garlic, lactic acid starter culture.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e100% heritage breed, pasture-raised, and antibiotic free\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eRaised by independent family farmers\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003c\/ul\u003e\n\u003ch5\u003eArtisan\u003c\/h5\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTempesta Artisans, with its signature logo of the Roman Goddess blowing up a storm, is owned and operated by Antonio Fiasche. Tony has taken the food world by storm, emerging as one of the nation’s premiere curemasters thanks to his hard work ethic and refined yet diverse and creative palette.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOn a recent trip to Volo Meats outside Chicago we ate at his restaurant which offers up 50 delicious sandwiches — a menu made all the more remarkable because every single one of the meats had come through Tony’s plant and been artfully enhanced through his seasonings, marinades, aging, and curing processes. From the salami to the smoked turkey to the brisket and prime rib, meatballs, and sausages — even pickles and sauerkraut — everything he sells he adds value to and makes better.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTony started by making ‘nduja, a spicy spreadable salami. He learned the process from his father Agostino who ran an Italian restaurant in Chicago near O’Hare Airport for 45 years. Tony would go on to expand his repertoire, always reinvesting any profits into expansion, including purchasing two-story tall mixers, stuffers, and slicers. Tony’s meats can be found at Whole Foods, Eataly, and distributed by Chefs Warehouse.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eEven while expanding, Tony still remembers the agricultural roots of the products he makes, and from the beginning he has consistently sourced a percentage of his supply from pasture raised heritage breeds from Newman Farm Berkshire Pork and Lazy Red Wattle Ranch including all the Tempesta custom products found on our website, like sliced salami and mortadella.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWe are excited to see Tony move into a new facility in Volo, Illinois that will allow him to produce more in his own space. Volo is a 100-year-old German curehouse that Tony is actively renovating. It has its own maze of aging rooms, an elevator system, a 3-story smoke room, and even a secret tunnel that connects to the storefront!  As Tony grows his sliced salami line and invents new recipes — check out his new holiday roasts this year! — we hope he becomes a regular part of your menus at home!\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch5\u003eFarms\u003c\/h5\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhen Heritage Foods started in 2001 we set out to sell heritage Thanksgiving turkeys. For three years our turkey project grew, but naturally mating turkey is a seasonal food and two of the three farmers we worked with to raise birds were looking for a more regular source of income if they were to continue working with us. So we committed to selling pork, which can be produced year round, as long as the breeds came from historic genetic lines, just like the turkeys. Now, 24 years later, Heritage Foods still works with those two original farms who together introduced the word “heritage pork” to hundreds of America’s best restaurants from coast-to-coast as well as thousands of homes through the Heritage Foods retail website.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eNewman Farm Berkshire Pork\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cem\u003eMyrtle, Missouri\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn 2006 we got a handwritten letter from farmer Mark Newman asking us if Heritage Foods would ever consider selling his pasture raised old school Berkshire pigs. We said yes and a relationship grew that still continues today, now through his son David who has maintained the genetic line of Berkshires which can be traced back to the 17th and 18th century lines that came to these shores by way of the Berkshire region of England.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFrom the air, Newman Farm Berkshire Pork, in south central Missouri, in the heart of the Ozarks, looks more like a pioneer settlement or a holiday camp than any sort of pig farm. Wooden huts are scattered across green fields like bungalows, where contented Berkshire pigs live their lives, happily on-pasture.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePigs on Newman Farm are raised 100% on-pasture. The sows raise their piglets in huts that dot the fields of the farm. The babies live inside the huts until they are old enough to jump over the 6-inch wooden board that blocks the entrance. Once they make the great leap, they have an entire field to run on and they can mingle with the other piglets from the other huts.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDavid Newman is both a farmer and scientist. “The farmer came first,” he laughs. His degrees are in animal science, and he holds a Ph.D in meat science and muscle biology, focused on meat quality. “As I became a scientist and got involved in education, I applied what I was learning to understand what we could do better.”\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBerkshires were the favorite breed of British royalty and were first introduced to the New World in 1823. Since then, Berkshire bloodlines have remained exceptionally pure and have become a mainstay favorite of chefs and diners, legendary for their exceptionally bright pork flavor and thick, delicious fat cap. And if anyone were to question their excellence, just ask David. “It’s not a matter of opinion!” he insists, passionately. “It’s a scientific fact, Berkshires are the most marbled hog on the market today.” David is a master breeder and works hard to keep the lines on his farm separate and he is always working to improve the Berkshire breed on his farm.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDavid lives on the farm with his wife, Kristin, his mom Rita, and his two kids. “I got my start through my family. My parents were hog farmers, but primarily in the commercial pig business. In the 1980s my parents raised pigs in confinement. There were some very challenging economic times for everyone in production, and we realized we were going to have to do something differently. Kristin came from a family farming background also and is a major part of the operations success today, working for the farm along with their team of employees.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e“In the 1990s my parents decided they wanted to go back to their roots. We were going to have to be very large to be successful in the commercial sector, and my father decided we should focus on quality. We changed our genetic program and our nutrition program. We became Certified Humane®, and we chose to focus on Berkshire pigs for their quality.”\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDavid and his family are the future of American farming! They are young, energetic and very passionate about the future of agriculture. David and Kristin work with a team of farmers who raise their Berkshires to supply Heritage Foods and the national network of chefs who rely on his product for their menus.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eLazy Red Wattle Ranch\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cem\u003eLa Plata, Missouri\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWe met Larry and Madonna Sorell in 2002, as growers for Frank Reese and the Heritage Turkey Project. As their turkey flock grew in size, so did the Sorell’s importance to Heritage Foods.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhen you see Red Wattle pork on a menu, what you are seeing is a five-state, twelve farm network founded by Larry and Madonna, dedicated to raising a storied breed that was once upon a time nearly extinct. Larry and Madonna are the heroes of this story, avatars of the heritage food movement, true believers who were destined to become the Guardians of the Red Wattle. They are proof positive of the ethos that when it comes to endangered livestock, “you have to eat them to save them.”\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn the beginning, back in 2004 when the Heritage Foods wholesale business began selling pigs, a market for the Red Wattle pig was built on a handshake agreement with chefs Zach Allen and Mark Ladner, then at Lupa Restaurant in NYC. They recognized the high-quality and undiminished taste that came from a Red Wattle pig humanely raised on-pasture and antibiotic free, using traditional farming methods. The deal with Ladner, and the partnership with Larry and his Lazy Red Wattle Ranch, were part of the origins of Heritage Foods.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e“We traveled 18,000 miles to get started,” Larry says matter-of-factly about a Heritage Foods Odyssey whose mission was to search out rare Red Wattle sows and collect a viable genetic lineage of this incredible pig whose American legacy goes back to 18th century New Orleans. \"When we began, we had two Red Wattle gilts and a boar, and we had to travel all over the United States to start a herd.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e“Now I’ve kinda retired from raising animals, but we have a dozen Amish growers working with us, and I pick up the hogs and pay for them, and then bring them to the processor, Paradise Locker. I drive a tractor trailer and go around picking up three hundred pounders, fifty to eighty head a week. We have farms in Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, Iowa... that’s a lot of traveling. We may have four or five pick-ups every week. You wear out a truck pretty fast.”\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eLarry, now over eighty, does less of the driving, but he still keeps all the relationships going, which isn’t easy considering the Amish don’t have phones inside their homes! “I’ll have to quit sometime but right now it’s going pretty good. The driving is easy. The hard job is you gotta keep Amish families happy, picking up their hogs, coordinating, monitoring the size of the animals, and making sure we have the right amount — each week we round up 50 to 100 pigs. And we’ve been doing it for almost 20 years now.”\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThanks to Larry and Madonna’s work, the Red Wattle was upgraded to Threatened status from Critical on The Livestock Conservancy’s watch list, a great achievement for the cause of biodiversity, one of the most important issues of our time.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eMetzger Farm\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cem\u003eSeneca, Kansas\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDoug Metzger's Tamworth and Berkshire genetics are now being shepherded by Robert Funk. Doug sadly passed away in 2023. \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDoug Metzger was truly at the ground zero of our business and the heritage food movement. He was the magic man that first introduced us to our processor Paradise Locker Meats, with whom we have worked and grown ever since and he worked together with Frank Reese raising heritage turkeys from about 2002 to 2013.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAt 83-years-old, Doug raises purebred, certified Berkshire and Tamworth pigs on his 1,500 acre farm in Seneca, Kansas, with his wife Betty.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn an era of specialization Doug is an anomaly. Doug is famous for adapting to any moment. In 2001 he took our call and agreed to raise heritage turkeys for us with Frank because he believed that the growing food movement would appreciate the flavor of the birds his grandfather raised. As demand grew for quality meat, Doug got into heritage pigs and transitioned his commodity farm to a pastured farm and haven for the rare Tamworth breed.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDoug has been farming since 1951. As a kid he raised chickens but gave them up when he got into turkeys. As he got older, he broke into the milk cattle game. Then he tried sheep, but he says he couldn’t get them to breed right. He also raised Aylesbury ducks — a rare heritage breed. Over the years the acres on his sprawling farm have been used to grow wheat, corn, oats, barley, sorghum, alfalfa, and rye. He even grew flax one year because he heard it was supposed to help the immune system of the cattle, which he thought it did. “It certainly made their coats look wonderful,” Doug says.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eToday farmers are incentivized to grow monocrops of corn and soybean — “that’s all they want us to grow,” Doug explains, “and farmers haul their crops to town instead of using it for something on their own farm.” Doug remembers fondly the days when a diversified farm would grow corn and turn it into whiskey, or when soybeans were grown for the purpose of feeding milk cattle — as Doug did on his farm. “Keep your grain,” Doug insists, “and use it to grow a truly sustainable farm.”\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDoug was never one to use chemicals to grow food. He believes any talk of sustainability is not real when you raise only one crop or when you use chemicals to do it. “My buddy and I could clear 100 acres of weeds in a day if we worked through the night, and we did not need any additives to do it. All those chemicals are part of the reason there are so many cancers around, if you ask me.” Doug has amassed generations of farming secrets having grown so many foods naturally, often calling upon experiences from decades ago to solve a problem that presents itself today.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDoug comes from a truly great American farming family — Life Magazine once wrote that Doug’s father, who lived to be 104, had more living descendants than any American – many of them farmers. His is part of the story of immigrants who came to the New World and made good through old-fashioned values, tradition, and hard work.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e“We’re here today to save these breeds,” says Doug, who is as down-home as the farm he still works on as he approaches his 84th birthday. “Save the breeds and make a little money. We got a lot of things going on, we have a lot of land. But it’s getting hard to keep up with it all… I need more young people! When I was young, we raised turkeys in spring and sold ‘em all by Christmas. We milked cattle all year round. I want to keep working — my dad was helping me when he was 84!”\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHis conversational style always brings insight and interesting thoughts to bear. We hope Doug and Betty work with us for many years to come and that their beliefs of diversified farming continue. Today, his farm is supported through the work of his daughter Marilyn and her husband Stan, and their children Simon and Joel.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eGood Farm\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cem\u003eOlsburg, Kansas\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eGood Farms' Old Spot, Duroc, and Tamworth genetics are now being shepherded by Dustin and Maria Torneden since Craig and his wife Amy retired in 2024. \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWe met the Goods through a connection at Kansas State University where Craig’s father was a distinguished professor. Craig spent his life in agriculture growing up in the Flint Hills of Kansas, some of the best agricultural land in the world, perfectly adapted to free ranging livestock, which feed on the perennial grasses that grow there naturally.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe Good’s hog operation began in earnest in 1981, and they have continuously raised hogs there for the past 37 years. Their Duroc herd started with a few sows from Craig’s former employer who started raising Duroc pigs in the 1940s — with females obtained through Sears and Roebucks! As Craig explains, “I took a job in 1975 working with an outstanding stockman who raised purebred Duroc pigs here in Kansas. His name was Fred Germann, and he was one of the oldest and best Duroc breeders in the U.S. Things sure have changed since then, but the Durocs that we now raise have ancestry that goes back to those Sears females, approximately 85 years ago.”\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDuroc is an American breed that was used as the foundational genetics for the entire pig industry in the United States because of their good growth rate, body type, and mothering instincts. But big agriculture continued to overbreed the Duroc for certain traits related to higher profits and they crossed it with other pig breeds. Soon the industrial pig became utterly unrecognizable, and it became almost impossible to tell that it had originally derived from Duroc genetics.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eCraig, on the other hand, continued to breed his Durocs to improve their genetics with traits particular to Craig’s preferences, while staying true to the original healthy and hearty breed. Craig always put a lot of thought into which sows he would breed with which boars as he worked to improve meat quality and edibility, as opposed to faster growth. He also selected pigs for the demeanor of the animals, who he treats like members of his own family. Craig bred for strong animals and sought out leaner carcasses (although the Duroc is supremely marbled). He also bred for skeletal size – Craig likes good length of body, for better loin eye size and fat distribution.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOver the years, the Durocs on Good Farm became his own breed, even though they looked like and acted like true old school Durocs. The Goods continue to bring in new lines to avoid inbreeding, but they work with the lines to continue improving their particular version of the Duroc.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eCraig and Amy also raise Gloucestershire Old Spots and Tamworths, both considered rare breeds.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eCraig's father, Don, was a meat scientist and would eventually have a division of Kansas State University named after him. Together they raised purebred Angus cattle and crops on the farm. “I have had a passion for raising pigs,” says Craig, since taking pigs on as a 4-H project in 1965. Craig studied Animal Science at Kansas State University. “Amy and I were married in 1976 and 5 years later we made the decision to move to the farm that my father and mother had owned since 1961, near Olsburg, Kansas, on 1000 acres of Flint Hills pasture.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch5\u003eBreed\u003c\/h5\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eRed Wattle\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThreatened: Fewer than 1,000 annual registrations in the United States.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOrigin: 18th Century Louisiana by way of New Caledonia.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFlavor Profile: Described as a cross between pork and beef, Red Wattle is floral and robust, concentrated and bold.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eProducers: A consortium of 18 Amish families in Iowa, Nebraska, Missouri, and Kansas.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHistory: French colonists brought these hogs to New Orleans as a favored meat breed. The Red Wattle eventually would populate the forests of Texas where they were rounded up and brought to the great slaughterhouses of Chicago. Recognized by their signature wattles that hang from the jowl, the Red Wattle resembles Kunekune pigs of New Zealand.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eGloucestershire Old Spots\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThreatened: Fewer than 1,000 annual registrations in the United States.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOrigin: 19th Century Indiana by way of Berkeley Valley of Gloucestershire, England.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFlavor Profile: Described as a charcuterie pig with a delicious milky fat.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eProducers: Craig and Amy Good outside of Manhattan, Kansas.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHistory: Descended from the native old English pigs of western England, this pig was mentioned as early as the 1780's. The spotted pig forages on fallen orchard fruits and other farm by products. Despite their signature oversized floppy ears which hang over their eyes, this gentle pig is hearty and self-reliant.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eTamworth\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThreatened: Fewer than 2,500 annual registrations in the United States.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOrigin: Rossville, Illinois by way of Staffordshire, England by way of Ireland.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFlavor Profile: A premiere bacon producer, Tamworth meat is fruity, earthy, clean, mineral, root, sweet and tender.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eProducers: Doug Metzger and Craig and Amy Good in Kansas.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHistory: The only native red breed to England, its heritage traces back to the wild pigs of Middle Age Europe. A slow growing breed, the Tamworth is active and hearty. Traditionally raised in the woods, the pig's long angular snout makes it an excellent forager — Tamworth pigs do not conform to industrial agriculture needs.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eBerkshire\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOrigin: 1823 Kentucky\/ Illinois by way of Western England and outside London.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFlavor Profile: Sweet with depth of flavor, Berkshire pork is balanced and the most universally loved of all the Heritage breeds.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eProducers: David Newman and a consortium of 12 family farms in Kansas, Missouri and Iowa.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHistory: For years the Royal Family kept a large Berkshire herd at Windsor Castle — our Berkshire pigs are traceable back to these old English genetics. This would eventually become the most popular Heritage breed of pig in the United States because of its supreme marbling. Prized by the Japanese who imported it as \"Kurobuta\" pork, the Berkshire is recognized by 6 white spots at the tip of its feet, nose and tail.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eDuroc\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOrigin: Eastern United States and corn belt by way of the Guinea coast of Africa.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFlavor Profile: Duroc meat is crisp and clean — known for great marbling and polished texture its taste is approachable on the palate.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eProducers: Craig and Amy Good outside Manhattan, Kansas.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHistory: The Duroc is an older breed of American domestic pig that has become one of the most popular breeds because of its great taste and strong genetics, but pure Duroc is very hard to find. Durocs are a red pig strain developed around 1800 in New England and reputed to trace their ancestry back to the early red pigs of Africa. Durocs are especially valued by farmers for their hardiness and quick but thorough muscle growth.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e[\/TABS]\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Heritage Foods USA","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40885432746042,"sku":"SLICED fino (1pk)","price":14.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/2602\/4380\/files\/HF_NewFinoshopify-3.jpg?v=1781023516"},{"product_id":"wagyu-big-red-salame","title":"PRE-SLICED WAGYU BIG RED SALAME","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eWagyu Big Red Salame\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cspan\u003eOne pack 3 oz pre-sliced salami\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003eWe are delighted to offer this rich and meaty salami using \u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003eTajima Wagyu Beef with notes of porcini mushrooms, garlic and a red wine produced in Indiana.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWe first met Chris at the Good Food Awards and fell in love with his wide selection of charcuterie. A respected member of the young talented generation of American curemasters using old world techniques while using sustainably produced ingredients, Chris is an active member in his community through his curehouse and shop. \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe secret to great meat is to start off with great ingredients, and nothing beats storied Heritage breeds! Each breed comes from a different culinary tradition, and boasts a distinctive, nuanced flavor.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eIngredients: Beef, Red Wine, Salt, Dextrose, Porcini Mushroom Powder, Celery Powder, Black Pepper, Garlic, Lactic Acid Starter Culture in a Collagen Casing.\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e100% heritage breed, pasture-raised, and antibiotic free\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eRaised by independent family farmers\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003c\/ul\u003e","brand":"Heritage Foods USA","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":41461232402490,"sku":"smoking goose salami (1pk)","price":16.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/2602\/4380\/files\/HF_BigRedSalamishopify-4_1.jpg?v=1781206366"}],"url":"https:\/\/heritagefoods.com\/collections\/salami-sausage.oembed","provider":"Heritage Foods","version":"1.0","type":"link"}